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PRIZE WINNING BOOKS 2025
CHILDREN’S PUBLISHED
Pandora’s Choice Subtitle: The Oracle Must Be Obeyed
E.A. Dickinson/U.S.A
It was the middle of the 7th Century BCE and the tribal villages on the islands of the Aegean were coming out of the Dark Ages and sending colonists to the far edges of Archaic Greece…
Pandora saw, in her mind’s eye every vivid detail of Graecus’ encounter with the Oracle. The voice of Pythia was like the sound of rocks and metal scraping against each other, her father had said. The fateful words which squealed out of the soothsayer’s putrid mouth were imprinted on the memories of her father and his one and only daughter, forever.
“First make an offering to Hephaestus. It is he who uses fire and molten metal, which quickens the blood of the blacksmith and the architect. Your colony will prosper long if you can bear the sweat and heat of forging new from old. Trade fairly. Don’t make risky promises.”
Chapter 1 Akanthos Beckons
Pandora stood atop the cool mosaic tiled floor and looked straight up. From within her family’s sun-drenched courtyard, she could view only a patch of sky; a sky of endless depth encased in the square frame of their courtyard walls. Above her, all was the color of an aquamarine gemstone. The crystalline, shimmering sky-blue dome reflected the jewel-like waters of the Aegean Sea. Awash in this land of sea, stone, and sky, Pandora’s breath and her wistful spirit now seemed to rise and fall with every salty wave that licked at the shore below her.
Beneath her new spiti; if one took the long, steep, stoney path to the shore below, sprawled the noisy harbor of Akanthos. It was chaotic with the clattering of donkey carts, sawing and hammering of port renovations. Pandora could hear its muffled sounds of re-birth even in her marbled sanctuary. This new colony was the final destination; the prosperous future her parents had planned. Akanthos was the northern apoikia for the other Greek families she had sailed there with, but to Pandora it did not yet feel like a “home away from home”.
Pandora’s mind wandered aimlessly, mired in sentimental thoughts of her past, idyllic childhood, and friends, left behind on Andros Isle. Behind her eyes, scenes shifted abruptly, as if her mind was trying to take in the many changes she had gone through to get here, and make better sense of them. Crossing the Aegean Sea and entering the northern Thracian Sea had had its own risks, and thrills.
Her first passionate kiss with Orion often came rushing back to her in her solitude. The sensuous memory of his salty black curls brushing her face still made her body shiver. She looked down in a sweet sadness at her left wrist and saw the braided and beaded horse hair bracelet. She had started wearing it again; perhaps it would make Orion jealous. It was a memento she wore from her very first boy admirer, a silly fickle boy of Andros Isle. Orion knew
Haemos had given it to her. She also wore Orion’s gift of the golden arm band encrusted with citrine and amethyst crystals from the great forge of Hephaestia.
Pandora wondered if he also knew how touched she was to accept a gift that deflected attention away from the ugly scar and glaring gap on that hand. How lucky that the stump of her fourth finger could be almost hidden if she closed her fist tightly, she would tell herself. The lovestruck pair had been together on the awful day she had severed her finger. They shared her pain and loss as if it had happened to both of them.
Since the day her family’s mazelike migration from Andros Isle finally ended, Pandora had felt adrift. Even the solid foundation of this new home; the mud brick and stone walls, the marble floors, the fig tree her father had planted in their courtyard; seemed to sway and shift fitfully. Perhaps the constant rocking-horse action of the ship for a whole summer’s season was still sloshing the salty blood in her veins to and fro.
Everything in Akanthos still felt foreign almost a year after their arrival. The pace of her family’s life had changed with her mother much busier trying to weave more cloth for sale to the traders at the new port. Her first fourteen years of life on Andros, where she absorbed the old customs, the faces, and smells of that place of her birth, felt stolen from her.
The blank page of her new life, in the far north Macedonian fringes of the known Greek world, invited a dull loneliness to creep into her heart. How could she begin to compose the next chapter of her life in Akanthos when she was tucked away in such dreary isolation in her parent’s spiti. Even Orion, her ship and soul mate, was too busy down on the docks to be creating new adventures with her.
What is it I am supposed to do here, in this land of lions and barbarians ? Where do I fit in?’ she almost said out loud. She wasn’t exaggerating. Man eating lions roamed up and down
those peaks and were sometimes encountered not far from the barley fields and vineyards of Akanthos itself.
With an involuntary shiver, Pandora looked away from her hands and gazed Northeast from Akanthos. Her father, Graecus, had told her of the tribespeople of Thrace, their home in the distant knife-like ridges and high mountain hideouts. She wished he had not described them so vividly. Those blood thirsty barboroi; were fiercely accurate javelin throwers and horsemen. A savage tribe of tattooed baby-eaters, or so she had been told, which could descend upon them from Thrace without warning. Such frightening images drove her even further into fear of venturing out of their spiti on her own; something she had never feared on Andros Isle.
Pandora, once such a bold, if not brazen spirit, became anxious at the mere thought of an encounter with brutish barbarian tribes or the fierce flesh-hungry jaws of a lion. The Athos Mountains with its deep, wild and impenetrable forests to the south of her hillside perch also offered little comfort. Pandora felt trapped between these two points of the compass in her newly adopted home. She told herself she would have to build up her courage once more and follow the foot path from her spiti to the long low beaches of Akanthos. She must find a reason to go down to the harbor more frequently.
Graecus, the appointed founder, the oikistes, of their colony, hardly lingered long with her in the courtyard to quiet her fears. He was needed at the reconstruction of the port. She could hear the seabirds squawking and circling the working men and fishing boats down there. The scent of morning pine wood fires coming up the hill mixed with the briny smell of kelp drying on the beach transported her to their first landing in Akanthos.
Pandora’s family had risked their lives as they made the treacherous approach toward the southern tip of one of Halkidiki’s three peninsulas. There, looming menacingly above them
stood the sheer cliffs of Mount Athos, towering over their tiny ship. Pandora had never seen such a tall and dense green forest topping a mountain before. She could only shudder at the thought of the secretive creatures and lesser gods of ill intent that might dwell there. To add to their anxiety the seas at the bottom of Athos’ sheer cliffs became easily confused and dangerous. Many merchant traders had lost their oarsmen, and goods when they were caught in the whirlpools and riptides. Pandora’s family had tried to brace themselves for this. The origin story of Mount Athos had been passed from poet to sailor as far back as the farthest mists of time.
It had been told, that Mount Athos was once a mega boulder thrown by one of the Gigantes, during their war with Poseidon and the Olympian gods. The ancient myth described a massive rock being hurled by the Titan into the sea, narrowly missing the trident wielding supreme god of the sea. That fabled megalith transformed itself upon landing in the center of a deeply forested mountain. Some say it was Poseidon’s daughter Eirene that caused the deadly boulder to become this wild promontory. She was after all a goddess of nature, spring, and peace. Sailing past the hovering hulk, Pandora’s family prayed to Eirene for a peaceful ending to their voyage.
Pandora secretly gripped the hand of Orion as he crouched next to her on the deck. She could feel his muscular hand – the hand that was learning to cut and shape wood into boats- pressing steady and sure on hers. Tossed about for many tense minutes in the shadow of Mount Athos, Pandora imagined the serpent legged Gigantes, wrapped in its golden orange panther skins, trying to crush her tiny family by catapulting deadly rocks towards them. Thankfully, only a light offshore wind whistled through the trees of the densely forested slopes above them, as they rounded the sea battered cliffs.
Sailing around this final horn of highlands into a quiet turquoise cove’s welcoming embrace, the captain’s great skill at commanding the oarsmen had carried her precious family to safety. Relief rippled through the ranks of the flotilla’s crew and each exhausted colonist. Their well-earned reward for avoiding a meeting with Poseidon at the bottom of the swallowing sea, was gliding into the gleaming calm of Akanthos cove and landing softly on its milk-white beach. It was nearly the end of the most eventful summer of her life. The sea voyage was over, but the more difficult adventure of settling permanently on a foreign shore was about to begin.
The first months were warm and balmy as the family set up their hilltop domicile but soon they could sense the coming of winter with stormy sea winds buffeting their walls at night. Seclusion in her stone courtyard was becoming more of a necessity. She faced a wetter winter than she had known on Andros. Pandora would have to become accustomed to living perched on this knobby “finger” of land. Akanthos was midway up the most eastward peninsula on the claw of Halkidiki. Each day that went by Pandora fought the unexpected isolation in the only way she knew how, her persistent imagination. She may have had to give up her friends on Andros, and her summer of freedom on the migrant ship with Orion, but her creative mind could still be sparked.
Pandora’s father sought to raise her spirits by painting a fanciful and optimistic picture of Halidiki. Graecus would say that this three-fingered claw of land they now called home; might someday scoop up all of the jeweled islands at its fingertips and make her the richest woman in all of Greece. If only such fantasies came true and real riches came her way, she was certain Orion would be hers forever. He could build his finest ship for them and they would once again visit the wondrous places and people they had met on their way from Andros to Akanthos .
She prayed silently as she gazed skyward. “Somewhere atop the highest cloud bank and westward from where I stand, does rise Mount Olympus, home of the gods. Oh Zeus, supreme ruler of the sky and earth, bring my family good fortune, Oh Aphrodite, let not the flame of desire for me be extinguished in Orion’s heart.”
2025 Copyright Claimed by Elaine Dickinson-Commins, as a citizen of the United States of America a Self-Published Young Adult Historical Novella available at https://www.blurb.com/b/12530055-pandora-s-choice
SHORT STORY Published
Beneath a Darkening Sky
Judith Crow /Scotland
I could not refuse the request. A young man, with a stratospheric career beckoning at The Daily Telegraph & Courier, wishing to hear my memories of the Grand Tour.
When I set out as a twenty-year-old woman, accompanied by my brother and a zealous fervour for adventure, Mother insisted I would return with sufficient memories to sustain me for life. It was her hope, no doubt, that I would domesticate and begin a family. I certainly generated sufficient memories for a lifetime, but I returned with no desire for marital life and have never wavered since. Times I might have sought companionship have been assuaged by the proximity of friends, and any desire for children was fulfilled by my darling nieces and nephews and, lately, their own children.
My memories became their memories. Just as the journalist has done, they soak in my stories as if to slake some fierce appetite.
Oh, the magic of the Grand Tour in the days before steam engines and telegraph machines! When such an undertaking may as well have been a journey into the darkness of space! Samuel and I revelled in our travels through France, Switzerland, and into Italy, basking in the culture and landscape: painting, writing, composing and, of course, gathering antiquities to adorn the walls and mantels of home. Still, our meticulous itinerary left me yearning for spontaneity so, as we began our journey home, I persuaded Samuel to accompany me on an impromptu expedition into the Black Forest. We arranged to meet our party at Baden-Baden, where we intended to take the waters.
The Black Forest immediately lived up to its reputation for mystery. No sooner had we began our journey than some locals informed my brother, whose German was always excellent, that a great wolf had been sighted within the trees and the mayor was offering a handsome reward for anyone who secured its hide for display in the Rathaus. Samuel was a fine shot and, since my sole incentive was to experience adventure, a hunt was ideal.
However, the anticipation proved the greatest excitement and, despite the enthusiasm with which we began, the day closed with us hunting only for shelter. I am told industry has left little of it now, but then the forest was a thick entanglement of trees. Without the surefootedness of our horses, we would undoubtedly have come to grief amongst twining roots and leafmould.
Eventually, amid growing darkness, we found a little house in a clearing. As Samuel beat his fist against the door, we wondered if the building was abandoned, until an old man came out and looked up at us from behind a long beard. I recall a thrill of excitement that we may have stumbled upon the Father of the Forest.
However, his words – which my modest grasp of German made comprehensible – were littered with curses. He clearly resented being disturbed until, unable to make himself heard, Samuel held up a large purse. The hooded eyes creased, and a smile twitched across the man’s face before he gestured for us to enter, snatching the money. Then, he guided us to a curtained-off area with two small beds and fetched some water before stabling the horses.
Samuel suggested I clean myself, laughing at the dirt marking my cheeks. I used the frigid water and a handkerchief (our host provided no cloths) and, eventually, the process guided me towards sleep. Reclining in one of the beds, my mind drifted, until I awoke to the delicious aroma of roast meat. As I breathed it in, I blushed at my stomach’s unladylike groan. Once I was confident the noise had abated, I drew back the curtain, smiling across at our host despite his sour expression.
“Whatever is cooking smells delicious.”
I assumed at the time that I must have misplaced some word in the compliment, as the man dragged me into the room, leading Samuel to jump to his feet. However, faced with our host’s strange behaviour, neither of us uttered a word. The old man hurried through the house, slamming the shutters. Each time he reached through an open window, he grimaced and turned away, clearly unwilling to glimpse the darkness. By now, the meat was beginning to smell violently overcooked. The small room filled with an acrid stench, and I pressed my cuff against my nose, much to Samuel’s quiet amusement.
It was a good deal later that we were permitted to retire, and I was desperate to escape his strange company. Having allowed the meat to spoil, supper was merely biscuits and watery beer. My first true pleasure of the day came when I lay back on the bed and allowed sleep to take me, despite my brother’s ungodly snores.
The following day, Samuel left early to continue his hunt and, as our host was clear I would be more of a hindrance than good company, I set out too. I was fascinated to discover a trail of thick, black charcoal leading from near the door and into the forest, and I committed to discovering where it might lead. As I followed it, ignoring the scratching of the low branches, I realised I was walking further and further into the darkness. For the first time, I fully understood how the Black Forest had earned its name.
Staring at the smudge, my vision danced, but something continued to lure me along the trail. At last, it came to an end, and I looked up to find myself in another clearing, very similar to the one where I had spent the night. Here, the smell of burned cakes hung in the air. I wandered around looking for any explanation, but the clearing was utterly empty.
I was about to leave when my senses jolted in response to a child’s voice behind me. Even as I turned, the sound came from the opposite direction, and I waited to hear footsteps. However, as I stood there, the laughter continued to move without any other noise, and I shivered at the thought of children I could neither see nor identify. For the first time, I noticed how no sunlight penetrated the clearing: the only light was sickly and filtered dozens of times by dense vegetation. A flickering shadow may have been a child’s movement, until I noticed that it did not cross the floor; a cracking twig may have been snapped beneath a small foot, but without any accompanying movement.
Another burst of incorporeal laughter rang through the clearing and the hairs on my arms prickled. With panic outweighing possible indignity, I lifted my skirt and sprinted back towards the house, relying on the smeared charcoal to guide me.
The old man was outside, sawing a large tree trunk and, occasionally, lifting his hand to wipe beaded sweat from his forehead. Despite my initial urgency, it took me nearly ten minutes to steel my determination and walk over, ensuring nothing would betray the panic I had experienced. I drew in a deep breath and began to speak slowly in my best German, cursing myself for my poor grasp of the language.
“Are there children nearby?”
“Children? None.”
He did not even look up. I was once again offended by his attitude and continued to stare, willing him to engage.
“But in the next clearing?”
That seized his attention. He left the saw in the wood and got to his feet, so uncomfortably that it was a wonder I did not hear his bones cracking. Where his clipped answers had annoyed me before, this new silence was unnerving, and I chewed my lip as I attempted to summon the courage to continue.
“I went to the clearing.”
“Yes?”
“And I thought there were children.”
“How did you get there?”
I smiled again. “It’s a little silly. There was a trail of charcoal.”
Attentive silence and vocal indifference were preferable to the response I received at this point. My host sprang towards me with such vigour that I was convinced he was going to lash out. He started roaring, leaving me with no hope of understanding what was being said. All I could do was stare at him in mute disbelief.
“A trail?” I realised he was shouting. “A trail? Have you no wit? It is stupidity – not courage – which makes you follow trails in these woods!”
Fear and indignation lit a spark of temper within me, and I stormed into the house, closing the curtains to seal myself in. There, I considered the possible reasons for hearing children’s laughter, and realised it was most likely some unfamiliar birdsong, or else a stirred recollection causing my present consciousness to collide with that of the past. Perhaps it was simply a memory of Samuel and me as children.
Sometime later, I ventured out again and was almost relieved that the smeared charcoal had disappeared. I wandered through the forest alone, ensuring I kept to the path. It must have been market day, as I passed merchants and local tradesmen on the road, who all tipped their hats respectfully as I passed. By the time I had finished my walk, my mind was far more settled for having been amongst other, more usual, individuals.
Samuel was already back at the house by the time I returned, and he greeted me with a relieved glance and a few sharp words about my tardiness. We sat down for a dinner of tepid stew and stale bread then, with unreciprocated mannerliness, I wished our host goodnight and retired.
My brother must have followed me soon afterwards as, when I awoke to discover darkness outside, I could hear his snoring. I smiled at the sound and turned over, adjusting the thin covers to keep out the breeze which pressed through the wooden shutters. As I was drifting off, I was seized with a panic which made my head spin. I believed – no, no – I knew I had heard children’s laughter just outside my window. I was immediately torn between opening the shutters to investigate, and covering my ears against the noise which sent such a potent chill through my body.
However, if that sound had been unnerving, then what followed was positively bloodcurdling. The laughter paused and breaking the silence was a woman’s voice. I could not make out the words as they were frantic and, of course, the tongue was German, but she was undoubtedly pleading for her very life. I moved over to the window, resting one hand over my pounding heart and trying to summon the courage to open the shutters. I could smell the same delicious aroma which had so tempted my senses yesterday but had generated such a strange response from our host. Considering something so mundane gave me the courage to place my hands on the wooden shutters and throw them open.
Cold night air flooded into the room and Samuel stirred, turning over so his snoring abated. The wind was rolling through the leafy canopy, and an owl’s cry further in the forest caused some small animals in the undergrowth to scurry away. There was life all around me but, I was terrifyingly certain, none of it belonged to the children, or the woman whose pleas still rang through my head.
I pulled the shutters closed and, as I did so, balked at the stench which floated in from the main room. Once again, the formerly mouth-watering aroma had become bitter and sickly. I hurried back to bed and covered my face, attempting to block out the smell and any sounds which might pass through the window. By some miracle, I was able to rediscover sleep and enjoy forgettable dreams, rather than be haunted by the woman’s pleas and the children’s laughter.
The following day, uncomfortable with the idea of spending time alone in the house while Samuel continued his unyielding hunt, I rose early and breakfasted alone. Then, I put on a cloak and hurried into the forest, intending simply to admire the landscape. However, no sooner had I stepped outside than I noticed that, where there had been a trail of charcoal, there was now scattered ash: a grey smudge through the forest. The conviction I knew where it would lead only sparked an uneasy determination to find out for certain.
As I had anticipated, I returned to the clearing, losing myself in the smell of burnt cakes, and relieved to hear no noises beyond the ordinary. I looked at the trees more carefully than I had yesterday, certain I would find a blossom or fruit to explain the unusual scent, but there was nothing I could not identify. I sought the mundane desperately, wondering whether the sweetened air was the result of some fungus and, in my urgency to disprove the supernatural, I was even more alarmed by what awoke around me.
Once again, children were laughing. I tried to force my feet back in the direction of the house, but the blood had drained from my limbs, leaving me unable to escape. And now I could hear a third voice. There was no doubt it was a woman and, although not the same person as last night, she too was pleading with the children. I became certain that the last moments of some terrified soul were playing out in front of me. The pleading turned to screaming: a sickening, high-pitched screech, which reverberated through the entire forest.
Then, silence.
I stood for a moment, waiting for the children’s voices to return, but there was nothing. Gradually, the ordinary noises of the forest re-emerged: a bird scolded from the treetops, answered by a small animal shuffling through leaves. I remained still, listening to the gentle sounds and wondering whether these creatures had witnessed anything, or whether this monstrous experience had been reserved for me.
By the time I had summoned the courage and energy to follow the trail of ash back to the house, it felt as though I had travelled further than the rest of the Grand Tour combined. When, at last, I reached the house, my fear buckled, giving way to indignant fury. I stormed inside and demanded to know what was going on.
For a while, my host denied understanding me, then claimed to have no answers. Finally, when I refused to accept his pathetic attempts at rebuffing my questions, he moved over to the small window at the back of the house and began to talk. His words came out in an almost dreamlike tone, as though he could only explain the story if he detached himself from it.
“I married young,” he murmured. “This was my parents’ house and, when they died, I believed I would bring up my family here. But my wife could not have children. Of course, we did not know yet it was she who was barren.
“I was content. I had not her urge to procreate. But she wanted to be a mother more than a wife and became listless without that life. She left our bed. I should not say it to a lady, but my needs were different. I sought the affection she denied me, and found it with a neighbour.
“Imagine my surprise when this woman appeared at the doorstep three years later, with two weaned infants. She had no desire for motherhood, as different from my wife as any woman could be, but she had done right by the children until they could be raised elsewhere. I tried to conceal it, but my wife found the truth. Yet her interest in me had waned and she had only eyes for the children. They came to us unnamed, like animals, but my wife called the girl ‘Gretel’ and the boy ‘Hansel’.
“They should have been our salvation, but I was repulsed by them, remembering the sin I had committed against my wife and God by taking their mother. Six years after she had left them with me, I returned to my neighbour and begged her to take them back, but she refused. As I walked home, I lost myself in the forest and it occurred to me how easily I could inflict the same thing upon the children.
“To my shame, I could not bear the idea of them looking upon me as hating them, so I began to coax them into believing their stepmother was set against them. I constructed this tale for months, driving a wedge between my wife and the children, until I saw hatred in their eyes when they looked upon her, returned with angry confusion in her own. One day, I seized my opportunity, taking the children into the woods and telling them to wait for my return. I hurried back to the house, believing I was rid of them and telling my wife they had returned to their mother. But, that evening, they appeared at the door! Hansel explained, with a clear pride, that he had left a trail of stones to follow in case they got lost. It was another six months before I could attempt it again, although I took them often into the forest and returned them safely.
“That day, I led them so far in, I was certain any trail would be lost among the brash. Then, I left, relying on every sense I possessed to get me safely home, where I told my wife the same story. Sure enough, the children did not reappear that night, nor for the next five nights. Then, on the sixth night, there was a beating at the door, and I opened it to find my neighbour standing there, demanding to know how the children had found their way to her house. I told her I would not have them back and paid her to keep them, giving her every penny I had.
“The following night, there was no knock at the door, but I heard it open and saw Hansel and Gretel creeping in. They were whispering and laughing. They must have woken my wife, for she came from her bed to embrace them. I could see the loathing on their faces, but it was mixed with laughter and some evil intent. They asked her for food, saying they were starving after wandering the forest for days, and she lit the oven.
“I can still hear it now. And you. You have heard it too. I know you have. She was pleading… begging… They – little children – forced her towards the open mouth of the oven. They told her, laughing, how they had already burned one witch in her own fire, and now they would do the same again. She prayed, clasping her hands as she petitioned God, but all they did was laugh. Together, they pushed her into the fires of the oven and closed the door. Her screams ripped through the house. And the stench of burning flesh! Like meat but then so awful I thought it would kill me! But, God forgive me, I remained hidden.”
There was silence for a moment.
“And where are the children now?” I asked.
My host jerked his head towards the window. “How could I not?”
“You killed them?”
“They were not children. The way they laughed while they killed and tortured? They were Hell’s seed disguised as innocence. But they trusted me. Little fools! I fed them Belladonna in broth.”
“But,” I whispered, forcing my mouth to form the words, “they’re still here, aren’t they?”
The man nodded. “Since it happened, I could hear their laughter and smell the odour of my poor wife in the oven. I thought it was just memory: guilt coming back to haunt me. But now I have realised they are still here. Dead and buried, but somehow still here.”
He stopped talking, and this time I had neither the ability nor the inclination to resurrect the conversation. I stumbled away, thinking of the children dying in the beds my brother and I had occupied, and packed our things. When I came out, the man had gone so I stood outside, staring over to where the children were buried, as though I expected to see them rising from the ground. But nothing untoward happened and, when Samuel arrived, I insisted we leave.
We had not got far before my brother cried out in frustration, announcing he had left his journal under his pillow. I was furious at having to return, but Samuel cajoled me into believing there could be no harm in it. Having decided to protect him from the man’s story, I could not be angry with him on account of his ignorance. I agreed to return but said he would have to go alone into the house, as I had no intention of seeing the man again.
However, as we drew closer, a familiar smell caught on the wind. At first like roasting meat but, as we grew closer, becoming acrid and nauseating. My brother turned to me, putting his hand over his mouth.
“Can you smell that?”
I nodded, trying to ignore the plunging sensation in my stomach. “Haven’t you smelt it before?”
“No. He’s lucky he’s not burning the house down.”
I said nothing, unable to admit that the smell was the phantom stench of a woman burning alive so many years earlier. But hindsight now allows me to realise I should have known there was something different this time, since Samuel had never experienced the ghostly odour.
The house was empty, with an overpowering stench gushing out from the oven, which was pouring out a dizzying heat. Samuel instructed me to step back, but I could not tear my eyes from the oven door as he pulled it open. The corpse of our host tumbled out, blackened bones crumbling as they struck the floor.
I remember I screamed, and Samuel did too, but there was another sound there as well. We said nothing about it, instead attempting to address our gruesome discovery. Samuel stayed with the man’s remains while I rode to find someone to help us.
Once the lawmen had assessed the situation and decided our host had fallen victim to unfortunate misadventure, they encouraged us to move on. No one was interested in my brother’s repeated statement that it would have been impossible for the man to shut himself in the oven, but Samuel repeated his disbelief as we travelled on to Baden-Baden. From there, we forced ourselves to continue the remainder of the Grand Tour, following the itinerary faithfully to exorcise our memories of the Black Forest.
Curiously, this story did not reach its conclusion until over four decades later. My brother lived a long and happy life, marrying a fine woman and having seven beautiful children. I lived with him at times and, after his wife died, moved in to care for him in his final illness. There was calmness in his approach to death, as I would have expected from a man who had done his utmost for his fellows. However, on his last night, he called me and I found him in a distressing and uncharacteristic state of panic.
“I never mentioned it,” he said, his now-hooded eyes burning into mine. “In case you thought I was losing my mind. But I cannot take it to my grave without sharing it. That day in the Black Forest. There was someone else, wasn’t there?”
“Someone else?” I repeated, taking his hand, but the physical connection only seemed to make him more aware of my wilful misunderstanding.
“I heard them. Tell me truthfully if you heard them too, Marianne.”
“Heard who?”
“Children. When I am gone, I will swear before God: when we found what was left of that poor man, there were children laughing just outside the window.”
POETRY Unpublished
Journey to the iron gate
Stamatia Tsalouma/Greece
BECKONING
Beckoning from the East,
cool fingers brushed
the sleep from my eyes.
With silver shingles
the half moon had paved
a way across the bay.
THORN TREE
Buckled onto
burning shale,
the thorn tree is home
to countless creatures.
Flocks of stars,
shattered by time,
roost in her branches
before journeying on.
For the man who hung
in her jealous shade,
some say she dyed
her petals red;
that wicked as
the sun is cruel
she’ll tolerate no
other of her kind.
SODDEN
Damp stalks the wardrobes
and walls of our lives,
the papers she nuzzles
curl sodden as leaves,
and the hills wearing grey,
perpendicular sky,
cement colored clouds
rag the foursquare world.
Such a rain it takes for
corners to crumble,
for rubble-spewing gullies
to assert their seaward rights.
Sea squill, sparrows, drink thy fill:
damp is the forerunner
rot shall devour us,
papers, leaves, and all.
MEMOIR
The Nutcracker Chronicles: A Fairytale Memoir
Janine Kovac /USA
The following excerpt of The Nutcracker Chronicles: A Fairytale Memoir was originally published by She Writes Press and is reprinted here with full permission from the publisher.
Chapter 1: WAITING IN THE WINGS
1978
When I was seven, my ambitions were straightforward: I wanted to be a psychologist in the army, like my dad, and I wanted to be a ballerina, like the plastic figure that twirled around on the top of my music box.
Truthfully, the ballerina looked nothing like a dancer and not just because her legs were fused together. She had a tutu made from plastic netting, and her gold pointe shoes were really just a glob of paint. She was fake and flimsy and offered no clues as to what a real ballerina might do. I had to use my imagination.
Sometimes, when my mother was busy with my little brothers, I’d shut the door to my bedroom and change into a slip that was supposed to be worn under Sunday school dresses. It was pale yellow with lace along the hem and a tiny rose sewn into the neckline. It didn’t look like underwear like my other slips. It didn’t look like a tutu either, but when I’d twirl fast enough, the skirt would catch the air, and I’d imagine sparkles coming out of my skin and filling up the whole world.
My ballet lessons were held at Fort Bliss, the army base where my dad was stationed, which sat at the foot of the Franklin Mountains in El Paso, Texas. Not far from the army hospital where my brother had been born, next to the commissary where my mother shopped, and across from the big building where my father talked to other army guys in green fatigues and crisp tans, there was a big room for kids. On one side there was a carpet and a wooden boat full of toys. On the other, a linoleum floor, a record player, and a ballet teacher named Kathy. I spent a year’s worth of Thursday afternoons dancing orderly patterns of steps. Then, two months into fourth grade, Kathy suggested to my mother that I switch to a teacher who had more advanced students.
“Renée is a dancer with Ballet El Paso, just like me,” Kathy said. “Why don’t you come watch us dance in The Nutcracker, and you can decide if you want to take lessons from her.”
I had been to a ballet performance once before. I knew the stage was like a magic box suspended in space, and every time the curtains opened, it had new furniture. I could tell the back wall wasn’t a real wall; it was just a sheet with scenery painted on it. It was as if the dancers were jumping around in a cartoon.
Kathy danced lots of parts in The Nutcracker. She was a snowflake, a flower, Spanish Chocolate, and something called a “mirliton” of unidentifiable origin. She was listed so many times in the program I thought Kathy might be the star of The Nutcracker. But she wasn’t. The star was Clara.
Clara was not danced by a little girl but by a short grown-up named Renée Segapeli, who, I discovered when matching names in the program to the headshots of the company members, was actually the prima ballerina for Ballet El Paso. She was also the ballet teacher that Kathy had recommended to my mother. Some years Renée danced the part of Clara and some years she danced the part of the Sugar Plum Fairy. The year I went to take classes in her studio just across the railroad tracks from Juárez, she danced both.
For the first part of the ballet, the stage looked like an old-fashioned living room, complete with a fancy red-velvet love seat. The Christmas tree was obviously just painted on a huge tree-shaped cloth. But unlike the music-box stage of my plastic ballerina, it looked like there might be real magic in that fake scenery.
I watched as Clara’s bratty brother Fritz pranced around. I knew he was a troublemaker—I’d read the synopsis in the program. But even if I hadn’t, it was clear from the way he jutted out his chin and poked Clara with his sword when no one was looking. Fritz was also danced by a grown-up (who also danced as the Mouse King, Kathy’s partner in Spanish, and as one of the Russian dancers). When he broke Clara’s nutcracker, I was so mad I thought I was going to cry.
Fritz, on the other hand, looked terribly pleased with himself. He even had the nerve to taunt Clara with a little jig. His teasing was short-lived, however, because one of the cousins snitched on him. Discipline was delivered swiftly. I was not the only one who cheered at this.
In the second act, giant lollipops and candy canes replaced the painted sheet of living-room walls. Clara, now the Sugar Plum Fairy, had changed into a pink tutu, and the rest of the dancers—Chocolate from Spain, Coffee from Arabia, Tea from China, plus a few flowers with green bodices and petaled gowns—bowed to her. She shone with a special glow that the other dancers didn’t quite have.
She was like a ball of light, as if she knew a special secret. Maybe if I followed her around, I could learn how to be a ball of light too.
At the end of the ballet, Renée/Clara/Sugar Plum and her Nutcracker Prince stepped into a boat painted like a walnut. Even though I could see the wire that lifted them up across the stage, it was as if they were really flying. Stage magic. The conductor waved his hands up and down, signaling music that crashed like cymbals climbing stairs. On the final note, the curtain closed.
When it opened again, rows of dancers ran back onstage. They stood there waiting while we clapped for them. Renée and her prince were the last to come onstage. They ran in front of the other dancers straight to the middle. Everyone clapped loudest for them. Then Renée ran offstage and came back holding the hand of a man in a black pantsuit and guided him to the front. I knew he was the conductor. He didn’t seem to have done as much as the dancers had, and he certainly didn’t look like a ball of light, but we cheered for him anyway.
Just when I thought it was time to stop clapping, a woman in clunky heels handed Renée the biggest bouquet of flowers I’d ever seen. Renée took a single rose and handed it to the Nutcracker Prince. He bowed to her, and the applause started all over again. My hands stung from slapping them together for so long. My head buzzed and my chest felt fluttery, like the best kind of dizzy.
My mother and I worked our way to the mustard-yellow door that divided the audience from the dancers like salmon swimming upstream. Kathy was waiting for us. She was still wearing her brown tutu from the Spanish variation.
“Janine, this is Renée Segapeli,” she said.
Face-to-face with a real sugar plum fairy, I almost choked on my disappointment. Her face was caked with makeup that looked more orange than pink, and her chest was dotted with sweat. She wore huge fake eyelashes, and if that didn’t make her eyes look garish enough, she also had big black lines drawn over her eyebrows, white paint on her brow bones, and a tiny red dot on the inside corner of each eye. She had brown streaks on either side of her nose and along her chin. She wore a fancy silk bathrobe draped over her tutu the way a duck might wear a dress. On her feet she wore fuzzy slippers.
I must have looked scared because Renée laughed and took my hand.
“Have you ever been backstage before?” She led me to the wings, and my heart sank. I thought that going backstage meant I’d get to sit in the clouds around the magic box, but it was just a huge warehouse of a room with brick walls. It was worse than fake; it was as if I’d been tricked.
On the sides of the stage there were tables, and I recognized things dancers had held and masks they had worn. Everything was clearly labeled with masking tape. NUTCRACKER read one strip of tape, as if it needed a name tag to identify it. DO NOT TOUCH read another sign.
Closer to the stage, flanked by long velvet curtains, black poles with boxes of tissue taped to their stems held fat lights that faced the stage. Along the walls, thick ropes hung from the ceiling to the floor. It reminded me of the piano strings in my mother’s upright at home. If I were a mouse stuck inside a Steinway, it might feel like this.
The dancer who had performed the role of Fritz, the Mouse King, Spanish, and Russian strutted out of his dressing room. He was not wearing makeup. He wore jeans and sunglasses. And he was smoking a cigarette. He gave the Sugar Plum Fairy a kiss on the cheek, and she kissed him back, leaving lipstick on his face. They were friends. I could tell.
Something clicked in my brain.
As much as I wanted to believe it was real, I knew it wasn’t possible for boxes to float in the clouds in the middle of El Paso, Texas. But the fluttery feeling in my chest had been real. Renée’s ball of light—that was real too. All these things—ropes, lights, painted sheets, and dancers who glowed onstage—created an illusion that made people feel as giddy as if they had actually gone to a fairy-tale land full of sweets.
Maybe if I danced on that stage, I could climb back into the belief that magic was real life. Maybe I could turn the brick walls back into clouds.
I liked this idea very much.
Renée’s ballet studio was on the top floor of an old brewery on a street so small my mother couldn’t find it on the map. There were no signs anywhere. There wasn’t even a parking lot—just a lot of gravel and a big dumpster. The building—such a faint yellow it almost looked pink, and such a pale pink it looked like the sky just after dawn—was visible from the freeway. We saw it clearly each time my mother missed the exit. And if my mother missed the exit, we’d find ourselves in Mexico instead of ballet class. By the time we made it back over the border, class would be over.
The lift to the top was a freight elevator, the kind that required pulling on a strap to close the double set of heavy doors before it jolted to life and chugged up the three stories to Renée’s studio. It was faster to take the stairs.
At the top, there was a small waiting room for mothers and little brothers. Renée and her boyfriend, who was a DJ for the local rock station, lived in back of the studio. Their cat roamed freely between the ballet studio and the back rooms, and when she had kittens, they did too.
An arched doorway led to a dance space with a cement floor painted a shiny dark red and cathedral windows that overlooked downtown El Paso and the mercados of Juárez. I thought it looked just like the studios in New York that I’d seen in my issues of Dance Magazine. I was too short to see out the windows when I stood facing the barre until I rose to demi pointe. Then I could see the Franklin Mountains in the distance, the interstate in the foreground. The longer I balanced, the more I could see.
Renée always wore bright scarves, layers of plastic pants, and tattered leg warmers. Duct tape held her leather flat shoes intact, just like Natalia Makarova, the ballerina who’d recently defected from Russia. Or maybe it was Natalia Makarova who tried to look like Renée Segapeli.
I had my own fashion statement: leotards with matching tights, with a different color for each day of the week. On Mondays I wore pink. Tuesdays I wore light blue. Wednesdays were black, Thursdays red, and Fridays purple.
Thursdays were the best thing about dancing at Renée’s studio because that was the day I had private lessons. I basked in Renée’s special light, in much the same way the kitten she’d given me stretched out on my bed to soak up the sunshine that streamed in from the window. On Thursdays, the attention was all mine.
In my ballet classes at Fort Bliss, I knew Kathy’s eyes were on me and that the other students copied me. It happened with a regularity that made it feel inevitable, the same way I knew I’d spelled all the words right on my weekly spelling tests. We did the same combinations to the same music, always in the same order. I loved this almost as much as I loved pulling the focus of everyone’s attention. The preordained combinations were like a designated flight pattern.
At Renée’s ballet studio, things were different. Everyone else was older and taller, and some of them even drove cars. They knew steps I hadn’t learned yet, and because every class brought new combinations and patterns, I often felt like a little kid who gets to sit at the grown-ups’ table but can’t join in the conversation. But I learned something: I didn’t have to be the best dancer to pull the teacher’s eye. I just had to be myself.
One day a visitor came to class. His name was David, and he was the same dancer who’d performed the role of Fritz.
“Isn’t she remarkable?” Renée said to him. “I show the combination front and to the right, and she’ll do it to the back and to the left. Every time. She doesn’t even know she’s reversing it!”
I wasn’t sure what she meant, but I did know Renée thought I was remarkable. That’s all that mattered.
And then one Thursday: catastrophe.
It started out like any other Thursday. I ran up the stairs on the verge of being late, while my mother and little brothers took their chances in the creaky freight elevator. I stripped down to my red leotard and matching red tights. I heard voices from inside the studio. Sometimes the DJ boyfriend hung out with his friends in one of the back rooms during class, but these were female voices.
I hurried into the studio to take my special place at the barre only to find someone was already standing in it.
It was a little girl. She was shorter than I was, and she was cuter than I was. From the way she was warming up with her leg on the barre, I could see she was also more flexible than I was.
“Janine!” Renée gave me a warm smile as she took my hand. “I want you to meet someone. This is Dee Bee.” She motioned to the little girl, who grinned brightly. I tried not to glower. I might not have tried that hard.
“Dee Bee is in the fifth grade too. She’s going to start taking lessons here. Isn’t that great? Now you won’t be all alone on Thursdays. And she lives near you! Maybe you can carpool to class.”
Dee Bee’s mother turned to me and smiled. She was also short and cute, and I hated both of them.
“Let’s take our places at the barre!” Renée tucked a wisp of hair under her scarf and began to demonstrate a plié combination. Dee Bee’s mother gave a little wave and retreated to the waiting room to exchange phone numbers with my mother.
Dee Bee immediately assumed a perfect first position. Tummy in. Chin up. She was still standing in my place and Renée had not asked her to move, so I stood behind them, turning my toes out to the side more than I ever had before, sucking in my stomach to the point of holding my breath.
“Very nice!” Renée purred. “Now let’s begin. Demi plié and straighten. Repeat. Chin up! Shoulders down! Like a drop of water could fall from your shoulder down your fingertip.”
My first inclination had been right. Dee Bee was better than I was. Her feet were more arched. Her back was more arched. She could balance longer, turn more, jump higher, and she never went to the back and to the left when Renée demonstrated a combination to the front and to the right. My only solace was that I was still younger, if only by three months.
Things got worse. Nutcracker rehearsals started, and sometimes, after class, Renée would drive Dee Bee to their rehearsal in her dusty-pink Karmann Ghia while I went home with my mother and little brothers. Dee Bee, I discovered from eavesdropping, had been chosen to dance the part of the Bunny in the battle scene. Not a bunny. The Bunny. Now I knew I hated her.
Then . . . a lucky break. Ballet El Paso needed six pages for Sleeping Beauty, and both Dee Bee and I had been chosen to dance. Now I was the one behind the mustard-yellow door dancing in the magic box in the clouds.
CHILDREN’S Unpublished
Flora’s Flock and Other Stories to Read Aloud
Mike Mesterton-Gibbons /United Kingdom
A long, long time ago—so long ago, a pound was still worth twenty shillings—there lived a little old man who owned a little old farm. This man’s name was Old Macdonnell. On his farm, Old Macdonnell had no pigs, one bull, two cows, three calves, four cocks, five hens, six white chickens, seven yellow chickens and eight sheep—a ram, a ewe, and six lambs. The ram was called Yeats, the ewe was Maud
Gonne, and the lambs were Acorn, Bo, Curly, Dilly, Euclid and Florence.
Old Macdonnell had always looked after his animals by himself, for longer than he could remember. But now he was getting far too old to care for all of them, and so he decided to employ a shepherd.
Although he was such an old man, some of Old Macdonnell’s ideas were very modern. So when he held interviews for the job of shepherd in the back of his barn,
he made sure all the sheep attended, to see whom they’d like to look after them.
Now, the one thing Old Macdonnell’s sheep liked to do above all else was to copy. If they liked what you were doing—and sometimes even if they didn’t— they’d be sure to copy it. That’s why they were sitting cross-legged on bales of straw in the back of the barn, while Old Macdonnell himself sat cross-legged on a bale of straw at the front of the barn. He invited the first candidate to come inside.
She came in and sat down, and during her interview looked very bored and yawned a lot. So the sheep all looked very bored and yawned a lot. But when she had gone, they all looked at one another, and shook their heads, and decided: no, she wouldn’t do!
Then the second candidate came in and sat down. He was very nervous. You could see that he wanted the job, but during his interview he shook like a jelly. So the sheep all shook like jellies too. But when he had gone, they all looked at one another, and shook their heads, and decided: no, he wouldn’t do either!
Then the third candidate was ushered in. Her name was Flora. She had bright eyes and wouldn’t stop smiling. So the sheep all looked bright-eyed and wouldn’t stop smiling either. During the interview, Flora got hungry. So she took a yogurt, a jar of honey, an apple and a penknife fromher backpack.
She mixed a spoon of honey into the yogurt, cut up the apple into little pieces, dipped one into the yogurt, and put it into her mouth. Her eyes lit up as she swallowed. Then the sheep all came, took a piece of apple, dipped it into the
yogurt, and ate it. And their eyes lit up as they swallowed.
After the interview, when Flora had gone, Old Macdonnell shook his head disapprovingly.
But the sheep all looked at one another, and nodded their heads, and decided: yes, what fun it would be to have Flora for a shepherd! And because Old Macdonnell was so very modern in some of his ideas and saw that the sheep all
adored Flora, he decided to employ her—even though he wasn’t so sure she was quite the person he was looking for.
And now you know how Flora came to be employed as shepherd to Old Macdonnell’s sheep. The rest of the story is about what happened afterwards, and why Old Macdonnell sometimes thought that his modern ideas weren’t always his best ones.
Flora was very good at her job, and kept her flock well fed and well groomed.
Old Macdonnellwas proud of her. He didn’t really have any doubts about her until the day when one of his cows fell ill. It was a Wednesday in June, and Wednesday
was market day, and all the hens had laid a lot of extra eggs that morning, because Old Macdonnell had asked them to.
“These eggs must be sold in the market today,” said Old Macdonnell to Flora, “but I have to stay here and look after my sick cow. Will you sell them for me?”
“A pleasure,” said Flora. “How much shall I sell them for?”
“As much as you can!” answered Old Macdonnell. Then he left to see to his cow, and Flora gathered all the eggs into a basket, and got ready to leave for the market.
But the sheep had been watching as Flora gathered the eggs. And now they all looked at one another, and nodded their heads, and thought: “Let’s go to market too!”
So they all hurried round to the henhouse, and Acorn rang the doorbell, and Dilly said, “Hens, will you please lay some eggs?” But the hens replied: “Eggs?
We laid so many this morning, we’ll be sore for a week!” Then they closed the door, and the sheep all looked at one another, and shrugged their shoulders, and wondered what to do.
Fortunately, Florence had an idea. “Our neighbour Lord Mutton has lots of hens,” she suggested. “Let’s ask them!”
So they all hurried round to Lord Mutton’s henhouse, and Acorn rang the doorbell, and Dilly said, “Hens, will you please lay some eggs?” But the hens replied:
“We lay eggs for Lord Mutton, and we lay eggs for nobody else!” Then they closed the door, and the sheep all looked at one another, and shrugged their shoulders, and wondered what to do.
But then Lord Mutton himself came down to the henhouse, and rang the doorbell, and said, in a very deep, proud voice: “Good henny poos! Cluck! Cluck!
Cluck! Lay old Mutt some eggy poos!” Whereupon the hens stood up, and laid an egg each, and then Lord Mutton gathered them up and went back to his house for an omelette.
Then the sheep all looked at one another, and nodded their heads, and Acorn rang the doorbell, and Dilly pushed the door open, and Yeats called out, in a very
deep, proud voice: “Good henny poos! Cluck! Cluck! Cluck! Lay oldMutt some eggy poos. Lots of eggy poos!” Whereupon the hens stood up, and took a deep breath, and laid a dozen eggs each, and then sat down exhausted and went to sleep. Then the sheep gathered up all the eggs, and hurried off to find Flora.
“Gosh!” exclaimed Flora, when she saw them return. “Where did you find all those eggs? . . .Did the hens start laying again?”
But the sheep just looked at one another, and shrugged their shoulders, and smiled. And then it was time to leave for the market.
For a Wednesday in June it was very hot. Flora didn’t want to walk to market, and nor did the sheep. So they waited by the side of the road for someone to give them a lift. Before very long, a lorry drew up. It was driven by a very large pig.
“Wotcha!” said the pig. “Name’s Xavier—Xavier Bacon.”
“Good afternoon, Mr. Bacon,” said Flora, and she bowed halfway down to the ground. So the sheep all bowed halfway down to the ground as well, except for Yeats, who said he’d rather be made mutton of than bow to a pig.
“Where to?” asked Xavier.
“The market, please,” answered Flora.
“Sure thing,” replied the pig. “Hop in!”
“Will you take us home again as well?” asked Flora.
“That depends,” said Xavier, “on whether I’m sold or not. If I’m sold for bacon, then I won’t be driving home again tonight!”
Flora gasped. “Sold? Surely you don’t want to be sold for bacon?” she asked.
But the pig said only: “Why would a pig ever go to market, if not to be sold for bacon? . . .Hop in!”
So they all jumped onto the lorry, and Xavier set off.
It wasn’t far to market, but it still took a long time to get there because Xavier had never driven a lorry before, and he kept stalling it. They arrived late. The sale
of pork had already started, so Xavier had to rush away to find his pen, and Flora hurried after him, and the sheep all followed Flora. Then a funny thing happened.
Xavier’s trousers fell down.
Flora laughed. “Your pants are too big!” she told him.
“They may be too big,” replied Xavier, “but they’ll save my bacon!”
And Flora was just on the point of asking him how his trousers could save his bacon when he pulled them up, and held them in place, and hurried away at such tremendous speed that Flora couldn’t keep up. Next time she saw him, he was already locked in his pen, and the butcher was about to sell him off.
“Who will give me fifty pounds for this whopping lump of pork?” shouted the butcher. “At fifty pounds a bargain!”
Then a woman said to her husband “That pig’s ever so juicy, dear. Shall we buy him?”
“Fifty pounds,” demanded the butcher.
“It’s a bargain,” agreed the couple.
But no sooner had the couple decided to buy Xavier than he let go of his trousers, which fell down to his ankles.
“Oh!” gasped the woman. “That poor pig. He’s lost so much weight—there must be something wrong with him. Let’s not buy him after all!” So the couple bought a turkey instead.
After that, the butcher kept dropping the price, from fifty pounds to forty pounds, and from forty pounds to thirty pounds, and from thirty pounds to twenty pounds, and even from twenty to ten pounds. But still nobody would buy Xavier, because his trousers were so big that he seemed to have lost so much weight that everyone thought there was something wrong with him, and nobody wanted to buy a pig there was something wrong with.
Then the butcher said: “What, will nobody buy him, not even for ten shillings?”
. . . In that case, I’d better make him into sausages!”
“Oh, no!” screamed Flora, “you can’t make him into sausages, for then there’d be nobody to drive us home. I’ll buy him!”
“Cash or credit?” asked the butcher.
“I don’t have any cash,” replied Flora, “at least not until I sell the eggs.”
“Better be credit then,” said the butcher.
“Credit?” repeated Flora. “Oh, yes, credit! . . . Just charge it to Old Macdonnell’s account!”
So now Xavier belonged to Flora.
But no sooner had she sealed the deal than the sheep all looked at one another, and nodded their heads, and decided—yes, what fun it would be to own a pig. So Yeats and Maud Gonne picked out a pig apiece, and Acorn, Bo, Curly, Dilly, Euclid and Florence all picked out a piglet each, and the butcher said: “Cash or credit?”
And the sheep replied: “Credit! Just charge it to Old Macdonnell’s account!” And that’s what the butcher did. So now the sheep all owned a pig, and the lambs all owned a piglet.
“We’d better sell the eggs now,” said Flora. So off they all went to the egg market, dragging their pigs behind them. But by the time they arrived, the egg market had already closed. “Never mind,” said Flora, “it’s tea time anyway. Let’s call it a day!” So they all followed Xavier back to the lorry.
“Do you think,” asked Flora, as they made their way back home, “that Old Macdonnell will mind? I’ve spent a lot of his money on credit.”
“Why should he mind?” responded Xavier. “He won’t even know until he gets the bill.”
Xavier was improving all the time at driving the lorry. He stalled it only twenty times on the way back to Old Macdonnell’s—but he still couldn’t drive very fast,
because he had forgotten to take the handbrake off. So they all had plenty of time to exchange stories. Flora told the story of how she was hired by Old Macdonnell.
Xavier told the story of how he had previously belonged to Young Macdonnell, who was no relation to Old Macdonnell, and who wasn’t able to drive Xavier to market that morning because he had to see a man about a dog, which iswhy Xavier had had to drive himself. And Yeats and Maud Gonne told the story of how they had tricked Lord Mutton’s hens into laying some eggs.
“Well, you’d better return them as soon as we get home,” chided Flora. “And if we had sold them we’d have had to give the money to Lord Mutton!”
“Not all of it,” said Xavier, who was keen to show off his business acumen. “A seller’s allowed to keep 10%. After all, Young Macdonnell will get only nine of the ten shillings you paid for me.”
When they finally arrived at OldMacdonnell’s, the sheep jumped immediately out of the lorry and raced off to Lord Mutton’s to return his eggs, and Flora escorted the pigs and piglets along the path up to Old Macdonnell’s house. But she noticed that Xavier hadn’t put the handbrake on when he got out of the lorry, and she told him so.
“Oh,” said Xavier, “you mean this thing has a handbrake?”
“Yes, of course,” said Flora. “It’s that lever there.” And she pointed.
“Which way do I move it?” asked Xavier. “I’ve never used a handbrake.”
“Well,” said Flora, “it’s up now, so up must be off. So push it down, and then it will be on.”
So Xavier pushed it down, and then they all hurried off along the path to Old Macdonnell’s. But they hadn’t long gone when the lorry began to roll down the hill. It rolled all the way round a bend in the road, then over a bridge and down another hill, until finally it came to a rest in a ditch by Young Macdonnell’s. And that’s how Xavier returned the lorry to him.
The pigs were so excited about going to a new home that they couldn’t stop talking, and Old Macdonnell heard them, and came out of the house to see what all the commotion was about.
“By cripes!” exclaimed Old Macdonnell. “My sheep have all turned into pigs!”
“Don’t be silly,” said Flora. “The sheep will be back in a moment. These are the new pigs we bought for you. And they’re a bargain—especially this one.” And she put her arm around Xavier.
“But we don’t have a pighouse,” objected Old Macdonnell. “Where are we going to put them all?”
“They can sleep in the living room,” said Flora. And she brought them inside the house to show them where they would be living now.
Flora’s Flock /⃝c 1981, 2007, 2020, 2025
SHORT STORY Unpublished
The Noisy Quietude of Mikhail Gorky and Other Stories
Ken Pisani /USA
The Noisy Quietude of Mikhail Gorky
Mikhail Gorky cradled the man’s head in both his beefy hands as one might a melon before squeezing it for ripeness. The man’s eyes showed fear. Gorky rocked the head side to side before giving it a sharp twist. The relief was almost instantaneous, and the patient rose from the chiropractic bench, pain-free. He thanked the man he knew as Dr. Gary profusely, gave the assistant his copay, and went out into the world looking up at the sky for the first time in days.
Gorky closed the office for the afternoon as he did every Tuesday and Thursday, and took the subway to Brighton Beach, where he was known neither as Gorky nor his alias, Dr. Gary. He dwarfed a tiny corner table against a dark green wall at Skovorodka, a Russian restaurant on Brighton Beach Avenue, sipping black Georgian tea sweetened with jam and nibbling tiny sushkie before switching to vodka and a plate of cheese and cured meat. Food and drink were served and removed wordlessly. Such was his routine every Tuesday and Thursday and one weekend day—which day depended on his other weekend commitments, which were few.
Gorky was alone in America. Living a shadow life of lies.
***
In 1989, as a mid-level KGB Agent, Mikhail Gorky had been dispatched to the United States in pursuit of a prominent Russian hockey player who’d defected to the West at the World Championships in Stockholm, Sweden. Twenty-year-old hockey prodigy Nikolai Ivanov had eluded his KGB overseers on a team shopping excursion, slipping away from a fitting room and disappearing into a waiting vehicle while inadvertently stealing an ill-fitting blazer from the Gallerian Mall. After a stop at the US Embassy, he was whisked to America by executives from the New York Rangers, who’d helped arrange his defection. Nikolai hoped to see Cats, meet Koch, win the Stanley Cup.
Gorky’s task was simple, in that it was uncomplicated, but not easy given the parameters of his mission. Because the young defector had been granted asylum to play in America’s NHL, returning him forcibly to Russia was out of the question. Instead, Gorky would affect his willing return utilizing the threat of retribution against the parents and sister Nikolai had left behind to. Gorky would get a medal and promotion, while Nikolai would be sent to some cold, distant place to dig ditches only to refill them.
The other options open to Gorky were to kidnap or kill the young defector.
It all proved moot when, only five games into the season, a cheap shot from a hockey enforcer—a “goon” in the parlance of the game—injured Nikolai’s back, sidelining him for the season. By the time the Berlin Wall began to crumble under sledgehammers on both sides, the coming dissolution of the Soviet Union meant that few in power cared any more about the defection of a young hockey player, and Gorky was ordered home. But seduced by America’s abundance, its stores without lines and food without rations, Gorky had no wish to return. So he went into hiding from his Kremlin masters who had even less interest in a lost KGB agent than they did for the young defector. One year after Mikhail Gorky’s disappearance, with much bigger perch to fry as Russia’s political system continued to crumble, they marked Gorky’s file DECEASED.
Gorky needed a new American identity and he found one, as criminals did in those days, in a dead man who had no use for his. Wandering the vast Calvary Cemetery in Queens, his eye settled on the headstone of Gary Chumak who shared Gorky’s birth date of September 22, 1955. (He hadn’t realized until that moment that not only would the same birthday be easier to recall, but he had no desire to celebrate a new one.) The foreign-sounding Chumak—likely Ukrainian—would explain Gorky’s accent and, unlike other grave markers that boasted BELOVED HUSBAND/FATHER/SON/BROTHER and other family connections, Gary Chumak appeared as alone in the world as Mikhail Gorky, which would also assist the pretense.
Forgery being among Gorky’s KGB skills, he soon had a driver’s license, birth certificate, and social security card that would help him secure employment and housing. (It really was that easy; just a few years later, Gorky would shudder to think how he would have managed such a transformation in a new digital world where one could be found and undone merely by typing into a computer.) Gorky understood his primary attributes to be his size and strength, and ability to intimidate. He easily secured an off-the-books construction job on the basis of the first two, while the latter made refusing his application seem imprudent. For years, even as the Soviet Union collapsed and Russia elected its first president, he kept a low, undocumented profile. Occasionally, he wondered about Nikolai, the reason for Gork’s life in America, however unintended. He was surprised to learn that Nikolai had never returned to the NHL; he’d disappeared, as Gorky had. Despite having never completed his mission, Gorky felt a tug of guilt over his pursuit of the boy, his readiness to intimidate or even kill him for Mother Russia. Who was this man he used to be?
Years of hauling and lifting and spackling eventually led to a back injury that forced Gorky out of construction work. Gorky knew a great deal about backs. In his estimation an adversary had three primary weak spots, the first being his nose. The way it jutted from a man’s face, poorly designed by God, skinny but prominent and vulnerable as a freshly laid egg; a target that burst on impact and bled uncontrollably, diverting blood from where it was needed most, the man’s head. Gorky had broken his own nose with a rubber mallet, and then twice more when it healed, flattening it close to the plane of his face in the manner a professional boxer might suffer over time—a forced evolution that rendered it resistant against pummeling by others. Because most men under assault protect their faces, Gorky was fond of weak spot number two: knees. Kicking one in the opposite direction from which it was designed to bend effectively incapacitated an opponent foolishly defending his nose.
But it was the human spine, designed to keep a man erect in the architecture of a suspension bridge, that afforded the most versatile options to disable an adversary. Nearly thirty vertebrae stacked, Jenga-like, with a skull at its summit, each a small bone vulnerable to impact or force, as are the ligaments and soft tissue binding them together. Not to mention the nerves that send and receive signals to the rest of the body: damage the nerves to the neck and upper back and render the arms useless, while incapacitating the lower back will take out a man’s legs and, for good measure, play havoc with his genitals.
With his own lower back (and genitals) at stake, Gorky was concerned. He started seeing a chiropractor, who amazed him with his skill. In no time, his injury—the type that, had he inflicted it on another, might have incapacitated a man permanently—was healing, his symptoms alleviated and pain nearly gone. Offering to apprentice without pay, he learned what he could and practiced on injured former construction-site colleagues with considerable success. When it appeared the Teamsters were going to put a halt to his back-alley chiropractics, Gorky relieved the largest of them from debilitating sciatica, and he was permitted to continue plying his parking-lot trade. He soon forged diplomas from New York Chiropractic College in Seneca Falls and opened a small practice rotating necks and cracking backs.
Climbing rents had forced Gorky from Manhattan and then from Williamsburg and finally into Canarsie, where few residents could afford chiropractic care. It had also become increasingly difficult to manage an unlicensed practice, especially under the assumed identity of a man who’d been deceased nearly four decades. But “Dr. Gary” was good at his work; he could find those points of release with fat, nimble hands that had previously been used to batter men or choke them into unconsciousness. He charged a fraction of what a Park Avenue chiropractor might, took cash, and forgave late payments. Good word of mouth and the innate lawlessness of New Yorkers had kept him professionally engaged.
Gorky had heard about Brighton Beach and its population of émigrés fleeing the Soviet regime, as he had. Adrift from Mother Russia, he knew it could be a tether for him to the parts of his old country he missed: the simmering smell of its food, the sadness of its music, the throaty muscularity of its language. But he avoided the neighborhood for years, knowing he’d be unwelcome among Soviet expatriates were they to discover he’d once been KGB. One day when he stopped a woman to ask directions, she literally handed him his solution, presenting a small laminated card that read:
PLEASE EXCUSE ME
I CANNOT SPEAK
I WILL MAKE MY NEEDS KNOWN BUT PREFER NOT TO BE ENGAGED
THANK YOU FOR UNDERSTANDING
(PLEASE RETURN THIS CARD)
Gorky bought all the woman’s cards and took his first tentative trip to Brighton Beach. He strolled the boardwalk from Coney Island, taken aback by the expansiveness of the ocean, accustomed as he was to the dense forestation of apartment buildings where he lived and worked. He stared up in amazement at the Wonder Wheel, anticipating the warm weather ride he’d take as soon as he could. Shrunken ladies with patchwork faces looked up from their dominoes only briefly before returning to the neighborhood’s familiar omertà. Gorky watched about a dozen or so men, mostly overweight and middle-aged, begin turning jumping jacks in skimpy swimwear.
“Polar Bear Club,” an old Russian woman said in an old man’s voice. “Swim every Sunday, November through April. Crazy Americans. They find thing no sane person would do, and make club. Motorcycles. Skydiving. Jonestown. Polar Bears.”
And with that, the swimmers ran screaming into the thirty-degree ocean water, where they frolicked like drunken seals.
Gorky continued his wandering of boardwalk and beach, vendors selling drinks and Russian spoken everywhere, feeling joyous, warding off intrusion with his I cannot speak cards, handed out and accepted in return. Striding into Skovorodka, he dispensed yet another card, pointed and gestured his needs, removed a second chair from a tiny corner table and was left blissfully alone to consume tea, vodka, and cold Russian plates. Although drinking tea is social to Russians, his mute ploy allowed him to bask in the place’s Russianness unmolested for decades. (The single chair also discouraged intrusions.)
***
As those decades passed in a constructed veneer of normalcy, Gorky wondered only infrequently what had become of the young Russian defector, Nikolai. If their paths crossed, would he introduce himself, confess his mission to persuade, kidnap or kill? Might he invite him to join him for silent food and drink at his favorite corner table? Gorky’s reverie was interrupted by the new waiter, Yanni.
“Are you ready to order?” he asked, a simple question that should not have elicited such a startled glare from the patron, or a shouted admonishment from his boss behind the bar:
“Yanni!” Aleks hurled the waiter’s name at him like an insult.
Yanni returned to the bar and before he could ask, Aleks explained that the man does not speak, producing a small laminated card that read:
PLEASE EXCUSE ME
I CANNOT SPEAK
I WILL MAKE MY NEEDS KNOWN BUT PREFER NOT TO BE ENGAGED
THANK YOU FOR UNDERSTANDING
(PLEASE RETURN THIS CARD)
“For many years he comes, to sit in that spot and read his paper and nibble and drink,” Aleks explained, scratching his brush moustache thoughtfully. “If we were ever to close the restaurant, I’d leave the table and chair for him on the sidewalk.”
“Is he deaf?”
“No, so don’t shout at him. Just bring him a pot of tea, jam, and a plate of sushkie. In a half hour, replenish the tea. In about an hour, he’ll give me a nod and then you’ll bring him vodka—he’ll have three—and the charcuterie.”
Yanni attempted to take all this in while wondering why his boss had not returned the man’s card. Gorky watched none of this, returning to his newspaper, preferring to remain disengaged from all conversation. Aleks lifted a case of Baltika 6 Porter, turned, and almost immediately laid it back down again, gripping his back. He swore in Russian, his distress visibly apparent to Gorky.
The mute giant rose from his table and strode behind the bar, indicating an offer to help with a flurry of meaningless hand gestures. (Gorky had never learned to sign properly, thinking it an overinvestment in his charade). With arms like twin pythons, he grabbed Aleks from behind and lifted him off his feet, producing a series of cracks that drew the attention of diners across the room. Released, Aleks was stunned that not only did his back no longer hurt, but his breathing seemed easier too… and was it possible the colors in the room were brighter? He turned and took Gorky’s hand in both of his and pumped it vigorously, thanking him. Gorky reclaimed his hand and wiggled his fingers across his lips in what he imagined might mean, “You’re welcome,” while more likely indicating a man asking to eat a butterfly.
He returned to his table and was followed by Aleks gripping a bottle of Moskovskaya. He poured shots and they drank, and Aleks momentarily eyed a chair but Gorky returned his attention to his newspaper, communicating his desire to remain undisturbed. Aleks withdrew to the bar, a leprechaun’s lilt in his step as he carried on his business, until another commotion drew his attention: Yanni had spilled borscht on Gorky’s crisp white shirt, a deep red clot that reminded Gorky of the time he was shot in the stomach.
The bell above the door at Wu Cleaners jingled and a shamefaced Aleks entered with Gorky. Aleks had convinced him to change into a waiter’s tunic (thank goodness he had a double-XL in storage) and accompany him here where the owner, Lei Wu, laundered all of Skovorodka’s things—linen napkins and tablecloths and uniforms. He was certain his friend Lei could restore his shirt to cleanliness while they waited. As Aleks and Lei spoke, Gorky’s gaze drifted across the photos on the walls, images of famous people who presumably patronized the dry cleaner—8 x 10s in color or black and white, some signed (most not), some personalized to Lei (or “Lee” by those who scribbled without asking). Even across decades, it seemed dubious that these scores of semi-celebrities had found their way to Wu Cleaners in Brooklyn. It caused Gorky to wonder what photos hang in the dry cleaners of smaller locales without celebrity patrons, or if those proprietors were just grateful to save the cost of frames?
As Lei examined the badly stained shirt, Aleks noticed Gorky’s contemplation of the photos. He attempted the kind of small talk that Gorky had spent decades avoiding.
“Imagine, all these people come here.”
Lei perked up and gestured to one of his favorite photos, of Joe Gannascoli.
“Sopranos,” he beamed, before elaborating: “Gay Vito.”
Gorky continued scanning the many photos on the wall until, arriving finally upon the face of young Nikolai, hockey stick in hand and staring back, the supposedly speechless man shouted, “Bozhe pravyy, eto on!”
Aleks found it hard to wrap his head around the fact that the man who had sat silently in the corner of his restaurant for so many years could speak.
And now those words came in a torrent. After decades of cloistered secrecy, the truth flowed from Gorky as if from a burst hundred-year-old water main, about his life in the KGB, his disappearance and theft of a dead man’s identity, his sham career, and the face in the photograph on the dry cleaner’s wall of the defector who’d caused it all—to whom he owed his existence in America, dispatched to facilitate his return or otherwise cause him harm. Aleks had to admit that if he himself were a KGB agent thought to be dead, he too would have avoided talking about it, although the extremes taken by the man he now knew as Gorky were beyond him. In a world of lies and subterfuge, Gorky must have been good at his vocation.
Lei continued working on his shirt, all the while listening to the Russian’s story unfold. He knew nothing about the Soviet hockey player the man was tasked with returning to his homeland, who’d vanished years ago and now laundered his shirts here. Lei couldn’t recall soliciting the hockey player’s photo but it had to have been long ago, maybe decades. Merely laying eyes on his face again had triggered the large man’s gushing confession. It was all too much for Gorky, who now wept openly. Aleks took him in his arms and disappeared in Gorky’s.
Lei could feel the man’s terrible burden of a secret kept for decades, and wondered if he might somehow help. He looked through his tickets, pulled one and approached them both.
“His pants are ready.”
***
They sat and waited, Gorky once again wearing his own shirt, pristine and white again after Lei’s astonishing handiwork. Just one more amazing thing of this surprising day. Gorky imagined Nikolai’s life these past thirty-some years, hiding as he had. Was Nikolai also as alone? Whatever had befallen him, how much was Gorky to blame? For more than thirty years, Nikolai’s fate, a life likely ruined and cloistered as his own, had haunted him.
Gorky had ceased leaping to his feet every time the tiny bell above the door announced another patron, when Nikolai finally arrived to claim his trousers. No longer the strapping athlete of his youth, doughy and round-faced, the mop of hair that once crowned his boyish features gray and thinning. Nearly sixty now, Gorky did the math. And walking with a cane.
Lei pretended to be unable to find Nikolai’s pants, stalling for Gorky to say something. But Gorky had lapsed into the silence he’d carefully cultivated for so many years. Aleks rose and offered his seat, and Nikolai accepted gratefully, relying on the cane to lower himself next to Gorky, presently squeezing his own knees with fat fingers.
“May I ask about the cane?” Aleks asked.
“Sciatica,” Nikolai replied.
Aleks waited for Gorky to reply. So too did Lei, turning away from the garment conveyor that continued to circle like a carousel, Nikolai’s pants passing again and again.
“Perhaps my friend can help,” Aleks finally offered. “He’s a talented chiropractor.”
Gorky reached in his pocket and handed Nikolai his card that said:
PLEASE EXCUSE ME
I CANNOT SPEAK
I WILL MAKE MY NEEDS KNOWN BUT PREFER NOT TO BE ENGAGED
THANK YOU FOR UNDERSTANDING
(PLEASE RETURN THIS CARD)
Nikolai shrugged in acknowledgment and returned the card. Gorky rose to his feet and gestured for Nikolai to do the same. He worked his way behind him, placing a hand on Nikolai’s neck and the other at the base of his spine, slowly bringing both hands together as he felt for imperfections, compressions, misalignments. Then he looked around and gestured, palms down, his hands moving away from each other, indicating a flat surface. Lei stopped the carousel and ushered them to a back room. He cleared items of clothing from a table and soon Nikolai was on his stomach, his face hanging over the side but held at the cheeks by Aleks at Gorky’s silent direction. Both the holder and the man whose head he held felt a little silly.
Gorky went to work on Nikolai’s back and leg. He fingered Nikolai’s spine and kneaded his glutes, recalling the young player’s greatness on the ice and lamenting what might have been for both of them. Less than ten minutes later, Nikolai stood unbent, his pain as vanished as the stain on Gorky’s shirt. Gorky was grateful to the benevolent God who allowed him the skills to repair the broken body of the man who’d caused him to live free in America. He was glad he hadn’t had to kidnap or kill him.
Nikolai thanked Gorky profusely.
“Pozhaluysta,” Gorky replied, without thinking.
LGBTQ
Swimming in words
Luke Icarus Simon/Australia
CLARITY IN HEROD ATTICUS STREET
The regime I’m documenting
At Constitution Square
One crisp early evening
Late Winter Athens
The doctor By my side
Well That may be overstating it
City folk Criss-cross by
The traffic Utter bedlam
Since Karezi, Vouyiouklaki* were stars
We had done some shopping for his birthday
In a spotless exclusive shop Marousi
The sales assistant as she took my Visa
Whispered hoarsely in faultless English
He’s got the best bod!
My companion who’d passed Cambridge Proficiency
At fourteen no less Had no idea
Caged as he was In his hedonism
Gazing in the mirror Irrefutable leniency
I serenade roses in thirteen hues of choice
Buses boom by Brutalising us both
Creating shadows On our gloom
Bold I buy five Cream-coloured
The owner had travelled a lot On ships
Showed great interest In us
The doctor was silent His mouth taut
With teething He was glaring at me
As if I were a kernel He bit into in a rush
Anger Rage Humiliation
A clarification Of my criminality
*popular Greek film and theater actresses from the 1960s-1980s
I demand Demons I prosecute
Preconceptions I mangle
He knew what we were
He: oppressive I: submerged
We stopped At a park bench
In Irodou Attikou I knew he did not wish to kiss me
We loved this street Or did I just think that
What will I tell my mother
When she visits
Who shall I say gave them to me?
They’re not red
It’s not Valentine’s Day
Why should you have to explain anyway?
You just don’t get Greece
I don’t?
Evidently not
Desolation unfolds I was so close to perfection
Tears Frustration His finesse Trussardi
Hermes Armani An obsolete joke now
Roses for fuck’s sake Cream like champagne
The reason for terminating
A heart-felt promise Made by
A Greek kissing The edge of his crucifix
A pledge alongside Milva’s soaring vocals
Lasting a mere Thirty-three days.
MEASURING APOLLO
We’re together again
Two and a half inches separate us
Segregate us in height from each other
In bed the distance is just that
Down there the same difference
Power walking on the beach at Apollo Bay
A Winter mist Is this heaven?
He’s two and half feet in front
His limbs elongated sinewy
I remain swarthy stumpy
I want to speak
Call out in competition with the swirls of surf
Hey, this is it! This is as good as it gets, buddy!
It doesn’t get any better than this.
I’ve learned though to shut the fuck up
The disquiet inside feels like surprised ecstasy
As I walk steady towards his back towards
Remembering his arm around me three am
The two and a half inches of space which divide us
As we drive around the majestic coast in a slick cabriolet
As we prepare dinner narcissists near each other
Two and a half inches our breaths caress as he asks
Do you ever think of mermaids? That someone beyond the horizon?
Those inches metamorphose into an un-crossable strait
Our song will always remain the same
Until life turns over the last unfriendly card
The laughing clown in colour sadistic
Then six feet will replace those inches
Measured time and time again
Between us.
LAST PRAYER
Forgive me father for what I have not become
As a grown man the son you had hoped for
Was it a pre-emptive hint that you left us all
Just when I turned two?
Had you chewed some predictive bay leaf
Seeing decades forth into the bleak future
True to your ethnic heritage
Renouncing weakness like the Spartans?
I recall a hunting trip where you shouted at me
Humiliating me with the final quack of the dead duck
Its still warm blood running down my leg
Whilst we sat in a borrowed beat-up heap of shit
All my schoolmates knew you did not live with us
You did not own your own car
Teased me you weren’t my real father
Your sky-blue eyes on another familial planet
Forgive me
For not fathering the smiling grandchildren
You crave
For being part of the gig generation in work
For not being a gambling man
For keeping my inherited sperm to myself
(Well, that’s a lie – I am paying them to freeze it).
God knows what else I have to apologise for?
Forgive me but it would be of great assistance
In this cavalcade of unearthed emotions
If you were to reveal the bungled tragedies
Inside the travelled corridors of your own mind
Your own inadequacies your imperfections
My older brother is reading The Narcissistic Family
He too irrevocably injured by your absence
“What is this word affection?” you famously asked last Easter
Forgiveness Father
Is something an Orthodox monk sought
Like an ice maniac on prescribed steroids
The monastery had depleted his foreplay skills
All he could do afterwards was mumble
A rote prayer
In the name of the Father…
You weren’t ever there to protect me
You never taught me stuff how to play soccer
Shoot a goal Defend my own personal space
Show me how Be that square-jawed macho man
My good looks only invited harassment from older men
My relationship with you A constant fortification
Was the most non-spiritual encounter
On the amassed calendar of unsatisfying conquests
All simply savoured In your missing honour.
PRIZE WINNING BOOKS 2024
SHORT STORY UNPUBLISHED
TOWNSEND WALKER
Black Crescent
The bride wore a satin gown with an open draped back. Estelle saw the birthmark on the bride’s left shoulder. She saw it, as the bride passed her, walking up the aisle, Estelle saw it close. Unmistakable. Against bridal white. Her hand shot to her mouth to cover her gasp. Rose. Rose, the baby she gave up twenty-seven years earlier, had the same black crescent birthmark.
* * *
Estelle met Rose a week earlier at a small supper given by the bride’s godmother, Charlene. Estelle thought the bride handsome, a face of angles, lightened by steel-blue eyes, framed by long tawny hair. She spoke in a drawl leavened by education in the north. Rose made Estelle talk about herself. Not something she normally did with strangers. Estelle confessed to spending all her time and most of her money on books. She was reading It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis, about the possibility of fascism in America, and recently finished Colonel Lawrence by Liddell Hart, a solid man, a life rudely told. Rose had read those books. And the two found, to their delight, their judgments on the subjects in harmony. They moved their chairs closer and leaned into one another. Parting, they took one another’s hand and kissed. A rare young woman, Estelle thought. This supper with her best friend and goddaughter came off as Charlene hoped. She had intuited like-mindedness and empathy.
Charlene, a war widow, had come to Columbia from Louisville in the mid 1920’s to become Adair County High School principal. Louisville is where Charlene became Rose’s godmother. Some years later Rose’s father, now a widower, moved to became pastor at Columbia Presbyterian.
* * *
The church was decorated as Estelle had never seen it. Arches of pink roses the length of the aisle with a pink satin carpet for the wedding party. Intertwined candles and roses formed wings on each side of the altar.
But Estelle could not stay for the service. She could not stay and not say anything. She could not remain silent when the minister, Rose’s father, asked “Does anyone know of any reason why Rose Anne Stringer and . . .” She surely would walk up to the altar and say, “This girl is my daughter. That man, there, is the true father of the bride.”
That man, there, in the first pew, on the right side of the aisle, was father of the groom. He was the father of the bride and the groom. George. He had acquired the veneer of money since she hadknown him. A florid face, a tight shave, a shiny dome, and 20 extra pounds. But she knew his low-set ears and the tilt of his head.
Georgehad been born in this town. From a broken home, he had run the streets, but learned to dress, to talk, to look good, even when doing bad. Muscle for Jesse Jacobs. Jesse would make you a loan, find you a car, provide you pleasant company, anywhere in Adair County.
Estelle slipped out of church so as not to disturb the ceremony, so the others would not miss her, not Reverend Springer, not Charlene.
She persuaded the limo driver to take her into town. The temperature had climbed into the 90s. “The ceremony will last another 30 minutes. You will have time,” she said, and gave him a dime tip.
She sat in the back seat of the car, a Packard, 1935 model, with an oval side window. I told myself back then, I’ll never see her again, if I do, the birthmark is how I will know her, know my baby. She looked back at the church, studied it, and turned away, before the chauffeur drove off.
* * *
Estelle gave up her baby with considerable reluctance. Her affair with the baby’s father had been a long one, and despite George’s reputation he had been a generous and considerate suitor. She’d even had hopes. But when she became pregnant, he refused to support the baby or her. He tossed her $20 and left town. He would not get stuck in a two-bit burg with a wife and kid.
She had been a salesclerk at Woolworth’s cosmetics counter. She had no choice about the baby. She could not support it and had no family to lean on. She was not told the name of the adopting couple. Better she did not know, the agency said.No fuzzy boundaries that way.For months after, she walked to the park after work. With no one around, she leaned into the ancient oak by the pond, and wept. Later, she went to night school, and landed a steady job as bookkeeper for Champion Construction, a regional builder.
* * *
Estelle read the wedding announcement in the newspaper. It said the groom and his family were from New Orleans. So that’s where George went. The groom graduated from Tulane and worked for an investment bank in New York. The groom’s father was a senior vice president at Whitney Bank. The groom’s mother was on the board of the New Orleans Museum of Art. The paper said Rose graduated from Yale Law, nowworked in the District Attorney’s office in Manhattan.My baby did well, she thought. And she is smart. I do not know if I could have done so well by her. But Charlene’s supper was more than I’d ever hoped for. To see her, a young, thoughtful educated lady, with a prestigious job. To touch her, to kiss her. My baby.
* * *
Estelle didn’t sleep. For two days and two nights her brain burned. Finally, she called George. “Are you going to tell them?”
“I am not, you have no proof. You’re making this up,” he said.
She said she had pictures and a birth certificate and the birth mark.
“I did not sign any certificate.”
“Parents don’t, George.”
“And if you say anything Estelle, you will regret it, I swear.”
Estelle froze in fear. She did not know what to do. She went to the library and read everything about the health problems of children whose parents are genetically linked. She wanted to talk to Charlene, but her friend was out of town. Then the new school year started, and Charlene was busy day long.
A month went by, Charlene told Estelle that Rose had a miscarriage. The couple had gotten a head start. The embryo had a severe heart defect. Rose and her husband sank into despair. Rose came to town to be with her father, for consolation and healing.
* * *
Estelle called George, father of Rose, father of Rose’s husband, pillar of New Orleans society. “Now will you tell them?”
“Your crazy story,” he said.
“Think of your child, your children. Think of your grandchildren.”
George shouted, “Have that stain on my family. We are not white trash!”
“Then I will. They must know,” she said.
“Do not do that.” George banged the phone down on his desk.
Estelle would talk to Rose and her adoptive father, Henry, on Sunday, after the service, in two days. She was determined. She would do this.
* * *
Charlene did not see Estelle in church on Sunday andwent to her apartment. A knock and no answer. She turned the knob, the door opened. She found Estelle’s body tossed across her bed like a rag doll. Bruises on her arms, around her throat. The next day, the newspaper carried the story on its front page.
Rose was shaken when she read the news. The woman with whom, even if for such a short time, she had felt such a bond, she would never see again, never talk with again.
Charlene asked Rose a favor, “Would you go down to the police, they could use someone with big city experience, I’m sure.”
“I’m not really sure what I could do,” Rose said.
“For me, honey.”
The next morning, Rose walked into the police station on the square in downtown Columbia. At the entrance, a policeman sat behind a desk, a screen for visitors. Behind him, a large room with desks and men. On the walls, a U.S. flagand the Kentucky state flag. “May I talk to the detective in charge of investigating the Davis murder?”
“That’s Matt Schmidt, over there.”
Schmidt, a large man, square jawed, wide bright eyes, she felt saw everything clearly. She admitted she probably could not be of much help. She did not know the territory but worked in the District Attorney’s office in Manhattan and had been part of some criminal investigations. The victim, Estelle Davis, was a friend of her father and godmother.
He reached out and cradled her outstretched hand in his palms, “This one is a real mystery to us, ma’am, any help would be useful.”
* * *
The door to Estelle’s apartment was not forced. It had not been locked. Estelle knew the killer.They walked into a living room wallpapered with scenes of the English countryside and with four tall overflowing bookcases. As her eyes swept the book titles, Rose felt a pang. She knew theywould have talked for days. In the bedroom, Van Gogh prints of children, Baby Marcelle Roulin. The killer wasn’t searching for anything. Nothing was out of place. They found a few pictures in the desk drawer. One old photo of a woman holding an infant. Probably a baby girl, a bow in her hair, puckered lips, hand around her mother’s neck. The mother looked maybe eighteen, nineteen. Rose took the photo with her.
That night, at Charlene’s home, Rose asked if Estelle ever said anything about a baby? “No, never. Adair County Hospital is just outside town, on Route 17. They’ll have records.”
Estelle Davis had a baby, 27 years earlier. The baby’s name was Rose Marie. The father of the baby was George Bridges. Who was George Bridges? They found him in town and school records: son of Mildred (nee Adams) and Fred, parents deceased, graduated from Adair County High, 49 years old now.
* * *
Rose called her husband. “Sugar, some bad news. No, not about me. I’m fine, ready to come home. I’ve been missing you terribly. But something happened. Remember the woman I told you about, the one I had such a lovely talk with at the supper the week before the wedding, before you came. She was killed. No, no one can figure why.”
Rose explained that Daddy and Charlene asked her to help with the investigation. “It turns out she had a baby, named Rose, like me. The father’s name was George Bridges.”
“I’m sure this is only a coincidence. George is Dad’s name and I don’t know what his real last name was.” Tom said when his father came to New Orleans years earlier, he changed his name to fit in. He claimed we were descended from the Arcadian settlers.
“Didn’t you ever ask him?”
“That’s not something you did. You did not ask Dad anything about his past. Far as he was concerned his life started when he arrived in New Orleans.”
“You can’t be serious?”
“I still got stripes on my bottom from the time he saw me going into the Courthouse.”
“Sugar, Bridges in not such a stretch from Dupont.”
“Rose, I’m worried we have a problem here. You don’t think, do you?”
“Not for a second, but we should clear this up while I’m here,” she said.
“Honey, you’re the lawyer. If anyone can figure this out it’s you. But be quick, please baby, I’m not going to sleep ‘til we make sure.
* * *
Rose told Matt they needed to search the apartment again. Matt reached back in the closet, top shelf, corner, elbow-length gloves, lace handkerchiefs, diplomas, Estelle and Rose Marie’s birth certificates, apartment lease. And more photos, another of Estelle with a baby. Baby wearing diapers only. Baby with its back to the camera.
Photo lab at the police station. Blew up the photo. Cleaned it up. Rose was standing between Matt and the lab technician when she collapsed. The baby had a black crescent on its left shoulder. They lifted Rose onto a table and covered her with a blanket. Fire department arrived, oxygen. She regained consciousness. She pulled her sweater off her left shoulder.
Matt protectively bundled Rose into his car and took her back to the rectory. She went straight to her room. “Look after this lady, Reverend.”
Rose looked at the photo again, thought about the so brief, so brief time she had spent with her mother. Rose emptied out.
The next morning. “Daddy, you haven’t told me everything?”
Her father blushed; he took her hand. “You were only a month old. We should have told you. We never knew who your birth mother was, or birth father.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Mama didn’t want to, made me promise not to, a real thing with her. She wanted to feel 1000% you were hers. She told herself all the time she had spent in labor, and losing so many, there were four before she finally decided to adopt. You were her baby.”
Reverend Stringer also confessed that they changed her birth date to her adoption date and changed her middle name from Marie to her adoptive mother’s, Anne. Rose sat down, put her face on the table and sobbed. Her father rubbed her back. She swatted his hand away.
Next morning. Rose walked to the park. At the pond, sat against a heavy tree. Nothing about me is true. She wept, talked loud, talked low, through lunch, through dinner, into the hour when the swans tucked their necks into their feathers. She whispered Rose Marie. She shouted Rose Marie. Jumped up, strode back to the rectory.
“I am going to find the son-of-a-bitch who killed my mother. And, George Bridges.”
Two days later, Rose walked into the police station. Matt jumped out of his chair to help her in. “You’re alright? Should you be here?”
“Thank you, Matt, but I’m not fine china. Let’s go find the killer.”
“No known enemies in town,” Matt said, “Out of town, who knew her?”
“What about her phone calls?” Rose said, wondering why Matt hadn’t checked this before.
At the phone company they found that Estelle had made a call, two days after the wedding, to Whitney Bank in New Orleans. Then, three calls in the last two weeks. Two to the same number. She’d received one from that number.
“Strange. My father-in-law, George Dupont, is a senior vice president there.”
“Say again.”
Rose explained.
“Let’s go see him,” Matt said.
“Not right away,” Rose said.
Rose had Matt call the Louisiana Vital Records Department for Orleans Parish. Two days later the news came back that twenty-seven years earlier George Robert Bridges petitioned to change his name to George Robert Dupont.
“Now we can go see him,” Rose said.
* * *
Rose called her husband. Told him he needed to hear this sitting down. She explained about her birth certificate and about their father’s name change certificate the police found in New Orleans. “Sugar, I am so sorry,” she said.
He did not understand why.
“It’s about children. We cannot have them, not our own, yours and mine. Can we live with that?”
Her husband balked. Brought up all the inconvenience of condoms. The sloppiness of pull out and pray. “Can we talk about it some more, when you get home?”
“Sugar, there is nothing to talk about,” Rose said. “After what happened with our first one. If we want children, we adopt.”
“I don’t know.” Her husband hesitated, “There won’t be more Duponts.”
“Do you not understand? There never were.”
“What would Dad say?”
“That matters? This is about us. Not him. I’ll call when I get back from New Orleans. In the meantime, I want you to think about this.”
“Say hi to Dad.”
* * *
“Mr. Dupont, I believe you know that your daughter-in-law is also your daughter?”
The banker blustered and hollered. “Some made-up story from a crazy woman over in that two-bit burg she and my boy got married in.”
Rose patiently explained that George Bridges is the name on her birth certificate and the New Orleans courthouse has a record of a George Bridges, born in that two-bit burg, becoming George Dupont some twenty-seven years earlier.
“And why?” Matt asked, “Did you buy a train ticket from New Orleans to that two-bit burg the day Estelle Davis was murdered, and back the following day?”
Mr. Dupont said he had business in that town. Dinner with a customer.
“You arrived at seven in the evening, left at seven the next morning. Ten hours round trip for a dinner?” Matt said.
Rose and Matt led George down a path that put him in the town, with no customer, “We checked Whitney’s records before coming down here, sir.” And the police had fingerprints from Estelle Davis’s apartment, full prints, probably a man’s, from the size. Not matched yet. And then there were the phone calls. “What were they about, Mr. Dupont?”
“Goddamnit, that woman was about to ruin my family’s name. The time, the effort, the money I put into getting here, a senior vice-president of the biggest bank in town, New Orleans society. I couldn’t allow it!”
* * *
Rose called her husband. “Sugar, things are not well down here.”
“What happened?”
“Our father was arrested for first degree murder.”
“Why?”
“He strangled my mother.”
“Are you sure?”
“I am sure because I was there when he confessed.”
“Rose, before you go, I keep thinking about this baby thing, I just don’t know.”
“I’m sorry you don’t get it, but what’s to get?”
A week later, Rose’s husband met her at Penn Station in Manhattan. Porters followed her with five wooden crates.
“What are those?”
“My mother’s books.”
“Where are we going to put them? Where are we going to sleep?”
She blew him a kiss as she led the porters to a waiting truck. “I know where one of us is. Seems we’ll be having more than a few things to talk about, won’t we, Sugar.”
SELFPUBLISHED BOOKS
KAREN MARTIN
Dancing the labyrinth
CHAPTER ONE
Cressida hugged her book. She had studied the Australian classic My Brother Jack by George Johnston last year in her literature class at college. Ithad beentransformational – nothing less than her passport to a new life – for it had revealed a precious secret: you could choose to go and live on a Greek island. It was an epiphany, she decided. She sat smug with the knowledge that she was escaping her drab neighbourhood of monotone houses with rigid doors that remained closed against the sunshine. The grid of conformity had finally lost its hold.
She re-checked her safety belt. The reassuring band held her tight against her window seat. She replaced her book with an in-flight magazine. Idyllic beach scenes lazed across the page. Crete was renowned for its turquoise seas and white sands. And pink, she grinned,the thought offering a maverick sense of joy.She fumbled in her pocket and retrieved a small container. She slipped a pill into her mouth and swallowed. One could never be too sure.
Crete had been an easy choice. Get away, the sirens had sung, and lured by an array of aiding and abetting cheap flights, her usual struggle in making decisions went on hiatus. It made sense to runaway to the birthplace of the Gods; as a child, she devoured Greek mythology, never fairy tales. She had read everything about the goddesses of old: Artemis, Athena, Hera, Demeter and Persephone. Time had been her co-conspirator as she immersed in their fantastical tales – eons away from her desolate reality.
Sitting compliant in her seat, she counted the minutes to take-off. Countdown to forever. Forever would take a bit over four hours to reach from England, and as she gazed up, distracted by its possibilities, a crack opened just wide enough to let an image of her mother slip in.
What the fuck?
Mother had no forever, not now. Cressida shifted in her seat. The man next to her had taken up all the armrest. She examined her mother’s image cautiously. Mother who, despite years of physical beat ups and emotional teardowns, never left the man she loved. Cressida turned the page of the magazine. She coughed and rubbed her nose.
As the plane began to taxi, she pushed her head firmly against the headrest. It wouldn’t be long now. Her hands lay clasped in her lap, her elbows in tight – a lifelong lesson of constraint. Body memory shuddered as he swaggered in, uninvited, trespassing her mind. She tried to block him but it was too late.She could at least avoid his face by focusing on the damage to his car. Side-swiped by a young learner driver. The car was a write off. Both cars were. The young driver had survived. Cressida felt glad about that. One less victim.
Her mother had stayed with her father in the hospital, sitting bedside for the two days of his coma and then mourned at his graveside, before succumbing to the eternal embrace of grief. Cressida had thought, had hoped, she was free of them.
*
The island airport greeted her with nonchalant hospitality and casual security checks. The bus into town maintained an aura of effortless welcome. Sipping her coffee, Cressida marvelled at the Venetian port. She never knew such beauty existed. She bought an English-Greek language book and set about organising a few day trips to learn more about the paradise she had inadvertently chosen. It seemed impossible that she was breathing in mythological air and walking down ancient paths.
Delight coloured her discovery of an older civilisation than the familiar pantheon of Greek gods. These Minoans worshipped a Snake Goddess. This Goddess was not any Adam and Eve fly-by-night snake, but a full-on Earth Mother, Divinity Goddess of Everything. The Minoans had been the most advanced European civilisation in the Bronze Age around 2000 BCE, and the island bore testament to many ruins of their cities, temples, and palaces.It was unbelievable to think this history had not been in the curriculum.
‘Perhaps it was taught on a day I wasn’t at school,’ Cressida thought, instinctively touching the slither of a barely visible scar on her forehead.
*
Brilliant sunlight streaming through the open window of her small flat in the picturesque village on the south coast woke her. Waking was never easy. Had she slept, or been hit? Possibly worse, was she waking from a panic attack? Immediate signs were noted: her pants were dry, there was no blood in her mouth or taste of vomit. She blinked rapidly to help recover memory and take in her surroundings. It took a moment to register where she was, and then her smile matched the sun’s. She had done it. She had a new home, a new job, a new life. She still couldn’t believe that she had been living here for several weeks. She had found the perfect village, where you could either walk in on trails or take the ferry. There were no cars, only pedestrian traffic.It was a destination, not a thoroughfare.
She had not dared to hope.She had learnt that for such a small word, it weighed heavy with expectations. Hope came with no instructions, only tears. She had come to Crete looking for escape; hope held no place in her dreams. Escape had been achieved.
Opening the door, Cressida welcomed the day. The crisp morning air kissed her skin. She struggled down the sandbank, her pink feet still tender against the particles of rock and stone,and was rewarded with a quick swim to the buoy and back, in pristine water.
*
It was a short stroll to the taverna where she worked; one of many, lining the shoreline with umbrellas and beach beds. The steady pace of service and laid-back attitude of her island’s hosts made work a pleasure.By late afternoon, the horn from the departing ferry was her prompt to collect the empty glasses, plastic frappe cups and overspilling ashtrays.
Cleaning up was already agreeably routine, and her thoughts wandered freely into stories, myths, or songs. She was accountable to no one,mindless work allowing for traversing trails of daydreams. Such was the power of the island that she could not help but be inspired. Tables cleared; she retrieved the mop from the back cupboard behind the bar.
“Where is my Greek broom?” she joked with the manager, searching out the hose. What he called the ‘elastic’ did a fine job, and she took pride in the glistening marble floor. Once done, all was ready for the next shift of patrons who would arrive any time after 10 pm for dinner and drinking.
It was when the day’s work was done, the current book read, and time was her own that Cressida struggled. Settling in was more difficult than she anticipated. She was not hungry, but her stomach complained. It felt empty, like something was gnawing away, creating a hole, a gap – some sort of nothingness.Keeping busy meant walking, swimming, drinking. And drinking. And drinking. She revelled late into the midnight hours with her new friends, Tequila and Margarita, and danced with Dionysus in uninhibited glory.
Waking up became more difficult for different reasons. Her head hurt. Over the weeks, strong Greek coffee became a morning ritual. It was a relief when the nothingness in her stomach began to feel full. She blamed the fluttering on the copious amounts of raki shots and beer she consumed. It was, however, persistent.
Unbelievable. You idiot.
She lifted her head from the toilet bowl, before having even peed on the stick. Her self-criticism was familiar.
Bet it will be blue – just my luck – blue for positive, blue for a boy. Fuck.
Mother would have called her tardy.
More ‘negligent’, I reckon.
“Kalimera. Umm…”
Her Greek had not progressed very far.
“Umm, I want ah, na thelo oh, you speak English? Great.”
She booked into the city hospital for a thorough check up, slightly more invasive than the urine strip.
*
Anxiety hitched a ride to the hospital. Her clammy palms reminded her to take deep breaths. The ferry was on time, gliding effortlessly into port over an oil-slick sea. Choosing a seat upstairs in the morning sun, Cressida adjusted her sunglasses before turning the page of her book. There was irony in considering terminating the residue of a random night of passion while immersed in a paperback romance. The ferry snaked its way past sheer rock cliffs standing sentry.
*
With the cold jellied tip of the ultrasound pressed to her tanned belly, she stared at a blob outlined on the screen. In the background, she heard the nurse proudly exclaim that she may be right, perhaps it was a boy, although admittedly it was too early to tell. Contempt seethed. A boy – not bad enough she was pregnant – but a boy?
“I don’t want a boy. Actually, I don’t want a baby, but especially not a boy.”
The nurse discretely left the room, avoiding the dark tone of Cressida’s outburst. Cressida poked her belly.
‘Whoa, now what would he say about this?’ she asked. She had not thought about her father for such a long time. She swallowed and tried to laugh it off. It sounded hollow and empty.
“Hey, you there, do you think…”
Tears started to fall.She ignored them.
“Do you think…”sniff, “you can come…”another sniff, “…come into my world.”She swallowed.“And… and… just change everything? Demand everything… just cos, just cos you’re a boy. Like your dick makes a difference? Do you?”
Memories as a daughter contaminated any possible maternal instinct. Accusations scratched at her throat.
“Are you gonna be a…?” she whispered hoarsely. “A fucker like him? Are you?Comes with the territory, you know. It’s in your DNA. Oh, he would like that.”
Tears prickled their downward path. The thin thread of emotion binding her to her father was a baited hook and leaked pain. Jagged breath splintered her lungs.Faded bruises and unseen scars rose to the surface of her skin. She sweated loathing.
What would he have said about this? The ache in her heart dilutedher wrath. Incessant thoughts and questions started to crowd out her thinking and she could not find any clear space to sort it out. She bundled up her belongings and fled the women’s clinic with its scent of responsibility.
Outside, a glint of light flickered, catching her attention. “What the…?”
She looked up. The sky was blue. It was an enormous wide blue sky. The brilliance of light shone through its blueness. It was so absolute and certain. She had never noticed before. The blueness of the sky held everything, and yet nothing, in all its vastness. It stretched into infinity. She breathed in the pause.Breathe out, breathe in. Relax.
OK.
The lapse was short-lived. An incoming tidal wave of released emotion crashed through her mind, tumbling thoughts in its wake: Fuckfuckfuck. What have I done, what should I do, how could this happen, why, what should I do, what can I do, it’s not fair.
His words rode her tears as she dribbled angst into the world.
“You were right Daddy, I am dirty, I’m nothing, I deserve this. It’s my fault, it’s all my fault. I’m a dirty, dirty slut. You said so. You were right. I am so sorry, so sorry. Daddy?”
Disgust reached down into all her dark hidden places. She cramped in response and moaned. It ripped through her gut as disdain flexed its muscle. Wiping her streaked face, Cressida sneered at her pitiful state; no backbone, no grace. Woeful.
Numbness crept up, offering respite, but Cressida shook it away. She deserved to feel this bad, to be punished. It felt like home. Her thoughts scrambled through a maze of dead ends. She could not find any answers, consolation, or resolution. Her head spun. She stood up.
“Get out!” she pleaded aloud. “Enough. Enough now.”
Determination entered her game plan and speaking into the world outside her mind helped regain some control. Revulsion retreated and her thoughts receded to background clamour. This, Cressida could work with. She resigned to being pregnant for a few days longer, until she could clear her head of the white noise that had turned red.
Feeling like she had somewhat corralled the unrelenting chaos, Cressida boarded a bus to return to the port. She sat down the back where it was empty of passengers. When the bus stopped again, at some indistinct part of the main road, a large woman in a colourful scarf climbed aboard with her equally large and colourful bags and packages and array of children of varying sizes. She carried a baby strapped across her very ample bosom and a small,skinny child clung tightly to her one free hand. The woman was followed by a young boy holding the hand of a smaller version of himself.They trudged down to the back of the bus and sat opposite and next to Cressida, filling all the spaces and places of her desired solitude.
The woman heaved her large form onto the seat with a grateful sigh and the assorted children appropriated the remaining space around her as if neatly arranging a life-sized jigsaw puzzle. Well, not quite neatly. There were overflowing bags, bra straps flopping down dimpled arms, shoelaces flapping and was that, oh yes, thick yellow snot riding the inhale and exhale of the toddler’s breath through one nostril. Cressida shifted in her seat to minimise any hint of body language that might be confused as an invitation for interaction. Her attempt to blend into her seat failed dismally. Her blond cropped hair did nothing to help.
“Hello dear, yassas.” The woman addressed her in accented English. Cressida smiled weakly; there was no escape except point-blank rudeness. Before she could answer, her attention diverted to the young boy. She watched as he pulled a tissue from his pocket and wiped the toddler’s nose. Just like that. Everything in that moment seemed to change. Cressida felt a wave of gratitude. Nope, that was nausea. The woman turned and thanked the boy, “Efharisto, kalo agóri mou.”
She returned her gaze to Cressida. “This one is like his father, sees the smallest things and makes good,” she explained, and ruffled his hair with a hand that miraculously seemed to be free of child, bags strap and burdens of retail. She laughed easily. “We raise our sons to be good people, yes? That is our job. Well, at least we try.”
The bus lurched and the family scene shifted abruptly with the jolt. Cressida now saw a fat perspiring woman burdened with a sleeping baby at her breast, with a hardening trail of vomit and milk dribbled on to her dress. A child clung to her hand with a plastic nappy smelling oh so unpleasant in the afternoon heat. The two boys were squabbling over some minute plastic gadget banned in any self-respecting first-world country, which, having dropped onto the floor, was rolling down to the front of the bus, sending both these brats chasing forward in howls of protest. It was a sweaty, smelly, loud, dirty example of domesticity, and, overcome with this stench of humanity, Cressida gagged.
“Stop the bus!” she blurted, “err … stasi, na stamatisei”
Standing on shaky legs, she pulled the cord to make good her escape. Fortunately, it was a short walk to the port and relief rode on a fresh afternoon sea breeze. The ferry waited patiently at the dock for her to board. It was thankfully an uneventful return trip, save for a buffeting wind and a bigger swell than usual. After disembarking, Cressida walked along the shoreline of black sand. Waves tumbled awry, splashing her calves, then sucked at her ankles as they returned to the depths.
She sat on the warm sand and watched as the waves took it in turn to crash onto the shore. She wished the day would sort itself out.
*
Cressida woke disorientated, suspended in the faint smudge of a dream. She wriggled her fingers; pins and needles prickling her hands. Had she screamed? She looked around. The beach was strangely deserted. Stiffly she rolled over and sat up. She looked out to the ocean. The waves seemed bigger than usual.
She could not remember falling asleep, but she could remember the dream. The sole gift of a recurring dream is in knowing the outcome. She shook her head hoping to shake out the dregs, but the images remained. Caught between wakefulness and sleep, she could still see a younger black-haired version of herself rowing a small boat. The craft was laden with woven baskets filled with animals. A previous dream stocktake had revealed a rooster, several hens, a urine-soaked billy goat, two does accompanied by knowledge one was pregnant, two sheep and a ram. They weighed the boat down. Although the ocean was calm, Cressida knew a storm would come.
She also knew that the boat would land safely in a small harbour. Yet her fear remained in the creases of time, for when the storm broke, with the rising crescendo of waves and rain lashing her face, it was impossible to see the cove from the water. Moreover, the young dark-haired Cressida was only a child and she had to carry the heavy responsibility of keeping the entire livestock safe, a weight just as solid as the massive oars held in her weakened arms. Cressida would wake screaming and drenched, soaked from either the waves of her dream or the sweat of her fear.
The mayhem in her mind realised she was awake and raised its volume. Her thoughts lobbed back into overdrive. Dozing off had only provided a temporary reprieve. Swallow, focus, deep breaths, plan of action – her doctor’s instructions echoed. Meditation might help, medication definitely would.
She looked for her pills – were they in her bag? She had not needed them since arriving in Crete. Was that four, maybe five weeks ago? Time here seemed to move at a different pace. Time was different; everything was different. If only she had not ruined it.
POETRY PUBLISHED
& WRITERS CHOICE AWARDI have decided to remain vertical – Gayelene Carbis
Australia
Marrying Freud: Ladder to the Moon
After ‘Ladder to the Moon,’ a painting by Georgia O’Keefe
I.M. Ania Walwicz
I dreamt I married Freud.
He was turning down the bed when I turned to see him,
one hand held midair as if he were conducting
something, an alertness on his face at a faint strain
of music, or a sound outside.
I thought of strutting past him in my new sleekness, all those
kilos I’d lost without him, while he was away and I was
alone. I’m so small after all, and those seventy kilos
had surrounded me, like I was keeping the world away.
Then he went away and now they’ve gone. So here I am,
standing at the door watching him as he prepares
in that painstaking way he has, slow but steady, and I thought –
I’m really not sure about this.
I’d leapt into love and sex (not in that order, he’d say)
when I was young and green, I didn’t know what I wanted –
a man, a house, a baby, a life. I knew I needed to write,
nothing else could have me.
I would never see a man now, I don’t know how other women
do it. Justifying male therapists with father issues and transference.
Power is always between you, like the sheets,
like sex, as he’d say. When Freud patted the sheet
as if it was his dog, I was galvanised into
action. I went back to the kitchen, sat at the table and wrote
about my day. It took me all night. He hates
sleeping alone. I stayed in the kitchen and when he came out,
bleary-eyed in the morning, I let him make his own coffee,
I’m not his fucking mother. When I woke from the dream, I decided –
there are going to be a few changes around
here.
###
Haunted
I’d filled the house with furniture.
Then thought, I’d better tell the landlord
I’ve moved in. The house was huge;
there were empty spaces out the back,
a rambling yard. I was in Buckley St.
~
When the Egyptian left, he’d said,
Buckley St! What hope did we have?
Still I dream of my beautiful house
that was never mine.
~
I stand behind the terylene curtain
and look out the window. I watch
the neighbours. Next door, there are hippies,
former housemates of mine.
They wanted to keep bees and chickens
in the courtyard, near the compost.
A few doors down, a woman I knew
in primary school who’s returned to the area
I’ve never left; her face has grown hard.
People show up in your dreams to show you
something but how can you ever work out
what? My Lacanian analysis is cryptic.
~
You will live and die in Carnegie,
the last thing the Egyptian said as he left,
standing at the door, then turning towards me
from the front gate. He made it sound like some
sort of crime. Though, he was prone to
statements like that, matter-of-fact,
almost factual, as if foreseeing the future is
possible. He believed in destiny, your life
mapped out and, ultimately, chosen by God.
He knew I thought it was the life I’d chosen.
But had I? Had he? Circumstances, family
and society bearing down on us.
I threw the yellow roses he’d bought me
that Christmas Eve, my birthday, in the bin.
I asked him if he knew why and he did.
In the dream, I tear the terylene curtain.
Call out to the neighbours, hide behind
the torn curtain. I know they will all find out soon
that I’ve moved back in
without asking anyone
if I could.
###
The Memory of Colour
After your painting ‘Angophora, Salamander Bay 2001’ by David Rose
I.M. Judith Rodriguez
I have decided to remain vertical.
Though there are footprints all over
my eyelids, my body,
I haul myself out of bed and
into bathers, knowing
how a day begins can keep you
upright just a little bit longer.
These morning routines,
like cats, wait on the window sill.
I am no longer a woman who wears
a hat and rides her bike around
Carnegie but now and then I return to
my bike like a long-lost friend.
I slip out of my sandals and leave them
on concrete while I walk in
bare feet all the way to the place
where I lock the bike.
The walk back is about twenty steps
and sometimes that is all it takes
to remember green, to feel it
in your feet. To feel practically feline.
I hover on the first step then wade right in.
I hold the colour of the sky
in my arms, and swim.
NOVELS PUBLISHED
ISTANBUL CROSSING
by
Timothy Jay Smith /France
DAY 1
Ahdaf dropped a coin in the tip bowl and left the hammam. The hectic street quickly robbed him of the languidness he had enjoyed stretched out on a hot marble slab. He dodged pushcarts and deliverymen, some shirtless in the warming day, and jumped out of the way every time a boy, clinging to the back of a wagon piled high with boxes, shouted warnings as he hurtled down the hill with nothing more to brake him than his heels in thin sandals.
It was no less chaotic inside Leyla’s Café. People—mostly dark men like himself with some amount of facial hair—sat around small tables, their voices competing to be heard, arms flailing the air as they acted out the stories they were telling. A tobacco cloud hung overhead, abetted by the men puffing on shishas that sent up drifts of sweet, tangy smoke.
Ahdaf squeezed between tables and dodged outstretched legs to reach the cowboy bar, a short counter in a cubbyhole so nicknamed because, on the walls around it, Leyla had tacked pictures of Hollywood’s most celebrated cowboys and nailed a line of cowboy hats to its overhead arch. Its three stools were predictably empty. Beer was acceptable to be drunk at the tables, but for most customers, sitting at a bar drinking beer or anything else suggested they embraced elements of Western culture, a direct affront to popular fundamentalist notions. That didn’t stop them, however, from recharging their phones with the power strips that Leyla had laid out on it. Only one socket was available and Ahdaf claimed it before someone else did. His charge was in the red zone, down to a suicidal three percent given when his own life depended on his battery’s life.
Leyla stubbed out a cigarette and flipped her black hair off her shoulder. “Are you coming from the hammam?”
“How can you tell?”
“You smell like soap.”
“Is that good?”
“It’s better than you smelled yesterday.”
“Was it bad?”
“You’re not wearing your usual blue shirt either.”
“I washed it. This is my back-up while it’s drying.”
A stranger, pushing up to the bar, said, “Sounds like you could use a third shirt.” Out of the corner of his eye, Ahdaf saw that he was older but not by much, and he could’ve passed for Turkish but his accent said he wasn’t.
“I only have two hangers,” Ahdaf replied, not looking at the man, not wanting to engage with anyone who wasn’t a potential client, and the man was too well-dressed to be a refugee.
“Do you want a mint tea?” Leyla asked him.
“Tea?” She knew Ahdaf would want a beer. Then it dawned on him, maybe there was something amiss about the stranger and that was her signal. “Yeah, and with an extra sugar,” he said. “My body weight tells me I’m undernourished.”
“That’s an extra lira.”
“Okay, no extra sugar. I don’t want you getting rich off me.”
Leyla laughed. “Get rich off you? I couldn’t get rich off all you guys in here put together, no matter what I was selling!” She dropped a third sugar cube into his glass. “On the house.”
He frowned as he stirred his tea. “We had jobs in Syria. I could’ve made you rich then.”
The stranger offered his hand. “I’m Selim Wilson. Sam if you prefer.”
Ahdaf ignored his hand. “Why would I prefer Sam?”
“It’s what I was called growing up.”
“You changed it to Selim?”
“My mother’s Turkish. Selim is on my birth certificate.”
“While you guys decide on his name, I’ve got other customers,” Leyla said.
“Before you go, do you have cold beer?” Selim asked.
She looked at Ahdaf when she replied, “Only one is cold.”
“I only want one.”
“It’s mine,” Ahdaf spoke up.
“You’re drinking tea.”
He took a sip and pushed the cup aside. “I pre-ordered the beer. Very cold.”
“I tell you what, you guys share it.” Leyla uncapped the bottle and planted it between them, along with two glasses, before squeezing around the end of the stubby bar to serve tables.
“It’s all yours if you want it,” Selim said.
“We can share it,” Ahdaf replied.
“Then I insist that it’s my treat.” Selim angled the glasses as he poured to produce only thin heads of foam. He passed one to Ahdaf.
“Thanks,” he said and took a sip. “Are you American?”
“Is my accent that obvious?”
“It’s an accent. I like to know where people are from.”
“It’s American,” Selim confirmed.
“If you’re an American, you must know who some of these guys are,” Ahdaf remarked, referring to the cowboy pictures Leyla had tacked to the walls.
“I know a lot of them. Not personally, of course, but from the movies.”
“Maybe you should take a selfie in a cowboy hat and stick it on the wall,” Ahdaf suggested.
Selim snorted. “It takes more than being an American wearing a cowboy hat to meet Leyla’s standards. I think you also need to be a movie star.”
“I think she just likes cowboys,” Ahdaf replied. Now that they were talking, he couldn’t help but notice how handsome Selim was, his dark beard groomed and his eyes chestnut brown. “I don’t think all those came from movie stars,” he added, pointing to the cowboy hats nailed overhead. “Have you been to Leyla’s before?”
Selim nodded. “Yeah, occasionally.”
“I’ve never seen you in here and it’s basically my office.”
“Obviously we work different hours.”
“I’ve also never seen another American in here.”
“I’m Turkish American. Maybe that explains it. Or maybe the fact that I wanted to meet you.”
Ahdaf’s danger alarm went off. He’d met lots of strangers at Leyla’s. Refugees were his clients and her café was where they knew to find smugglers to help them make the crossing to Greece. Selim, he sensed, wasn’t looking for that kind of help. “Why do you want to meet me?” he asked.
“I’ve heard you get things done.”
“What things?”
“Moving people.”
“Who told you that?”
“A lot of people could have told me.”
“But who did? I like to know how people find me.”
“He. She. It. I don’t remember.”
“Why the secrecy?”
“I need a reliable route for people to escape.”
“Escape what?”
“Turkey.”
“So you’re a smuggler, too?”
“Not like you, or why would I need you?”
“You don’t need me. Lots of guys do what I do.” Ahdaf checked his phone. “It’s charged enough,” he reported and dropped it into his daypack.“Are you CIA?”
“I can’t say who I work for. Not until we have an agreement.”
“Then I guess I’ll never know. Thanks for the beer.” He slipped off the barstool.
“Just remember, Ahdaf Jalil—”
“How do you know my name?” Ahdaf interrupted him.
“Just remember,” Selim started again, “what you call ‘moving people’ is trafficking to the rest of the world. Turkey could deport you back to Syria. Back to Raqqa and ISIS. Back to a push off a high rooftop.”
“Why have you come looking for me?”
“I told you, I want your help.”
“I don’t want to help you.” Ahdaf stood to leave.
“Take this.” Selim forced a business card on him.
“I don’t want it.”
“Sometime you might need help. Not everyone is a nice guy like you.”
Ahdaf glanced at the card. No name. Only a telephone number with a local prefix. “Do I ask for Sam or Selim?”
“You don’t ask for anyone. You leave your name and a message, and where to find you if you need help.”
“I won’t need help,” Ahdaf said, but stuck the card in his pocket anyway. “Thanks for the beer.”
“Maybe next time I can treat you to a meal.”
“I’m never that hungry.”
Ahdaf made his way to the door of the lively café. He knew some eyes trailed him. Nobody’s business was entirely private since most of it was conducted on the street. Everybody kept an eye on each other and not always to be helpful. Selim hadn’t said he was CIA, but he was somebody like that, and probably somebody in the café knew exactly who he was.
The door hadn’t closed behind him before his phone started ringing.
DAY 2
Ahdaf found a spot on a bench to claim one of the spigots on the long ablutions wall. “Salaam aleikum,” he said to the men beside him and slipped off his sandals. Turning on the faucet, he let the cool water run through his toes as the call to prayer droned through overhead loudspeakers. Like Ahdaf, most men along the bench kept their cleansing ritual confined to their feet and forearms, but some went through the full procedure of rinsing out their mouth, cleaning their ears, and snorting water out their nose.
He dried his feet with a handkerchief and crossed barefoot to the mosque’s entrance where heleft his sandals on a shelf. Slipping behind a heavy velvet curtain, he entered the vast prayer hall with its many tiers of stained-glass windows rising to the dome. Except for worshippers kneeling on the expansive red carpet, it was bare; there was no furniture or architectural feature to break the eye’s sweeping gaze. The praying men appeared inconsequential in the presence of Allah, which Ahdaf supposed was the architect’s intent.
Ahdaf wasn’t a believer though he liked the notion of religion. He liked the superstitions and rituals that were largely for luck, health, or good fortune. The downside was that he believed very little of Islam’s tenets, especially after they had been used to justify his cousin’s execution, which made it ironic that now Ahdaf used religion as part of his survival strategy. The mosque was a source of rumors and news, and he relied on both to stay informed.
That morning there was no imam. No sermon. The few dozen men who’d come to pray knelt in loose lines, bobbing out of synch to touch their foreheads to the ground while mumbling holy words. Ahdaf joined one of the lines, not exactly to pray to Allah but to plead with his parents to manage to survive the civil war and beg his cousin’s forgiveness if he had somehow contributed to his death. Those were his only prayers most mornings, but that day, he also thought about the family he put on the bus to Assos the night before, and prayed for them to be safe, too. When finished, he sat back on his haunches, eyes closed, enjoying a meditative minute before rousing himself to discover what the day was going to bring.
Outside, Ahdaf retrieved his sandals and dropped them on the ground. As he wiggled his feet into them, someone said his name. He turned to Malik, the headmaster of the mosque’s madrasa, a scrawny man with a prophet’s beard and a dark brown kaftan the same color as his dull eyes. “Salaam aleikum,” they both said and touched their hearts.
“It is good to see you so often at prayers,” Malik remarked. “It’s apparent that you are a man of faith.”
“Sometimes a habit can be mistaken for faith,” Ahdaf replied. “My father insisted that I go to prayers once a day.”
“It is not only habit in your case.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“You still come to prayers even though your father is not here to scold you.”
“Yes, it’s true, though I wish he were. At prayers, I see many men who remind me of my father. That’s one reason I prefer to pray at the mosque, not in a shop or on the sidewalk. Also, my father always spoke of the mosque as a place of fellowship as well as faith, and I’m alone in Istanbul.”
“Does the fellowship you seek include drinking khamr?”
“Khamr?” Ahdaf asked, repeating the Arabic word for intoxicating drinks.
“Beer.”
In one word, Malik sent a seismic jolt through Ahdaf’s world. Someone had seen him at Leyla’s having a beer and for some reason that was important enough to report it to Malik. Why was it important and why Malik? As the madrasa’s director, he was certain to be a fundamentalist, but did he go so far as the hisbeh—the religious police—to spy on people? “It’s rare that I drink a beer,” Ahdaf lied, feeling the need to defend himself.
“Even one beer is still haram,” Malik said. Forbidden. “I’m surprised a man with your strong faith would succumb to the temptation.”
“Allah is forgiving,” Ahdaf reminded him.
“The most forgiving,” Malik replied, quoting verse.
“Alhamdulillah,” they both said and touched their hearts. Thanks to Allah.
Ahdaf, wanting to end their exchange, smiled and took a step away. When Malik said his name again, it felt like a summons and he turned around. “Yes?”
“What did Selim Wilson want from you?”
Ahdaf gulped. “Selim Wilson?”
“He didn’t tell you his name?”
“Yes, but how do you know it?”
“He is an American spy. What did he want?”
“He wants me to help smuggle people.”
“Who?”
“He didn’t say.”
“We want you to help him.”
Ahdaf was baffled. “Help him?”
“We want to know what he’s planning and who he wants to smuggle. If he wants information, what’s he looking for? Anything you can tell us.”
“Who are you?”
“Brothers in faith.”
Ahdaf summoned the courage to ask, “Are you part of ISIS?”
“We help everyone who fights for Allah. Will you help us?”
“I told the American that a lot of guys move people. He doesn’t need me and you don’t either. Obviously, you already have spies.”
“Apparently Selim Wilson thinks he needs you. He picked you. He didn’t buy anyone else a beer.”
“I won’t help him for the same reason I won’t help you. I left Raqqa to escape a war. I don’t want to be part of a new war here.”
“You can’t escape it. We’re in a holy war and your faith makes you part of it. The West’s only faith is greed.”
Ahdaf, feeling ambushed, shook his head when he said, “I’m just trying to survive.”
“Can you contact Selim Wilson?” Malik asked.
He couldn’t lie. Whoever had seen him sharing a beer with Selim would’ve seen the CIA man press his card on him. “Yes, I can contact him.”
“Do it.We have an operation coming up. We need to know if he knows anything about it.”
“I need to think about it.”
Ahdaf, about to turn away, stopped when Malik added, “Don’t take so long thinking about it that you accidentally fall off a building like your cousin.”
Their eye contact held for an extra moment. Ahdaf willed his eyes to be expressionless. Malik’s were confident.
Contempt was their common denominator.
PRIZE WINNING BOOKS 2021
Τhis year, as promised we launch a new page on eyelands book awards, dedicated to the prize winning books, with excerpts of the books that won a prize in EBA 2021. With the permission of the authors we present a small excerpt between 500-700 words available to everyone! Every week, from April till 20 of June, there will be a new post at this page from our prize winning books.
You can find the text translated into Greek on http://www.eyelands.gr every Saturday!
U-18 Category: 1941 / Abigail Keoghan /Ireland
She thought of her father and the soldiers being killed, the thoughts of Conor leaving her and her family finding out she was dead; they were flooding her head. “No, no, please no, stop it” Aoife yelled “Leave me alone”. She placed both of her hands on top of her head like she had a headache. She arrived at the channel in time. She made it there, all by herself; she didn’t need anyone to finish this mission. Aoife sped into the bunker as fast as lightning. She saw a man of average height with short dark golden hair and eyes the colour of the sea. Aoife ran towards him.
“ Hello, who are you?” Aoife asked the man. The man turned his head to see Aoife.
“I am Lieutenant Mackenzie, what are you doing here?” the man asked. Aoife was stammering until she remembered what the mission was about. “I came from England with a message from GeneralKemp, the attack needs to be called off” Aoife panted.
Lieutenant Mackenzie looked at Aoife with suspicious eyes. “I don’t trust any girl who says that” Lieutenant Mackenzie replied. Mackenzie walked off and called the attack. “ No, don’t please” Aoife screamed.
The attack was launched but the Germans were prepared for this. All of a sudden, there was blood-curdling screams, gunshots and explosions. Aoife ran out there as fast as she could to see hundreds of people running and falling to the ground. She had to run, there was no turning back. She ran like she was being chased by a bear. Aoife ran as people were falling and explosions were ignited. She saw a boy in front of him fall to the ground, his leg was stuck. Aoife needed to help him. She ran up to him. The boy was tall and had black curly hair, tanned skin and gentle mocha eyes. She went onto her knees to release his foot from the hole. “Are youokay?” Aoife asked.
The boy looked to her “I’m fine” he replied breathless.
“What’s your name?” Aoife didn’t look up, she needed to help. “Aoife, you?” Aoife replied monotonously. He looked at her “Zachary” he replied with a smile on his face. She released his foot from the hole. Zachary stood up.
“May God bless you, Aoife” Zachary thanked Aoife; before running. Before Aoife ran after him, Aoife’s photo flew out of her pocket, it was flying through the wind, Aoife ran after it. She needed it. She depended on it. Suddenly, a bullet flew through the photo needed it. She depended on it. Suddenly, a bullet flew through the photo and it was obliterated.
Aoife stood still in shock. “No” Aoife whispered. Aoife needed to move but she couldn’t. All the other soldiers were running past her until one of them pushed into her causing her to land on the muddy, ash-covered grounds, causing her to become unconscious.
Aoife woke up a couple of hours later, hearing nothing. The entire landscape was foggy and white. She rose up from the white and greyground that was once green. She looked around she saw hundreds of bodies, none were alive.Aoife couldn’t believe it. Britain had lost. Aoife was on the brink of tears. Aoife had failed her mission. She lost everything, her partner, her family, her father, everything. Suddenly Aoife heard a noise coming from the fog.
“Any survivors?” a familiar voice called. It couldn’t be. it just couldn’t.
Her father.
“Any survivors?” the voice called once more. Aoife rose up ready to shout. “Dad!” Aoife cried. “Dad, I’m here!” Aoife began running with tears inher eyes to the voice, she saw somebody ahead of her. A tall man with dark brown hair multi-coloured eyes and fair skin, was just ahead of her.
“Dad, I’m over here” Aoife called once again. The man turned to herdirection. The man who once had once a frown on his face, was no more.The man had pure happiness in his eyes when he saw his daughter. They both embraced each other in their arms. “I love you, Dad” Aoife cried.Her eyes would stop releasing tears as she hugged her father. “I love you too, Aoife” her father replied.
//
My name is Abigail Keoghan and I live in Ballsbridge, Dublin, Ireland. I am twelve years old and I have a younger sister who is seven years old. I got my inspiration for writing by my book-loving aunts both wishing to publish a book. I love to write. My first book that I wrote was called 1941. It was about a young fourteen year old girl who went on a mission to save her father. I entered it into a competition when I was ten. Sadly I didn’t win but I decided to enter another competition the Eyelands book awards competition with Kenya’s Education (originally called Education or not I must learn something). I just love to write and I wish to become an author or artist when I am older.
Unpublished: The Grinning Throat (Mudlark Mystery 1) Kate Wiseman/ UK
The Mudlark Mysteries
The Grinning Throat
LONDON, 1872
CHAPTER ONE
My first thought is that it’s a pig that someone has lost to the river. Maybe that’s because food is always on mind. I’m permanently hungry and wishing for delicious, unattainable things to eat.
I think that the pig must have fallen off one of the barges that choke up the Thames. They’re a constant feature, toiling up and down day and night, giving off choking smoke that clings to the water. I’m shocked by this carelessness and I wonder that the owner didn’t try to retrieve it – pork’s expensive. A luxury. I haven’t tasted any since Dad died. Or precious little meat of any variety, if I’m honest.
The pig’s head is out of sight, hidden under the remains of a wooden crate. I’m surprised that no one’s lifted that. Wood’s got a value. Nothing to write home about – a halfpenny maybe – but beggars can’t be choosers and if we aren’t quite beggars, we’re only one step above it. The pig will still have some worth, too, if it’s not too far gone. Maybe we could clean it up and eat it some of it ourselves. The thought of meat, even meat that has been tainted by this river full of unsavoury debris, makes my mouth water.
I wonder how we missed this, the last time we were here. It must have been the excitement of making the Find.
Then it dawns on me that what I thought was some kind of cloth, wrapped around the carcass, isn’t that at all. The pig is wearing a suit, so mired by mud that I can’t even begin to guess its colour. Odd. But this is London and odd things happen all the time. Perhaps this was a lark by some gents with time on their hands and more money than sense. We see a lot of those on the foreshore.
Usually they’ve lost their precious pocket watch or wedding ring while they were three sheets to the wind and they’re trying to recover it before their wives or sweethearts find out. I’ve helped out gents like that before and they’re pretty grateful if you manage to find their lost possession, especially if you hold back from ‘discovering’ it until they’re close to desperation. There was a time when deceptions like that would have made me feel guilty, but those days have gone. You forget scruples when you’re fighting to survive.
I’m so busy calculating the value of these unexpected finds, and wondering who’s likely to give us the best price for what – Hopper for the suit, I think, although he’s a frowsty old miser who’d enjoy taking advantage of a couple of orphans if I let him, and Jack Frost for the meat, once we’ve sliced off a few of the best cuts – that it takes a while for the penny to drop. A pig? In a suit? I peer closer. My stomach does a flip. Hunger is making me stupid.
This must be what Hempson was looking for. Why he was so cagey.
‘Edie, stay back,’ I rap out the words, glancing over my shoulder. If this is what I think it is, she mustn’t see it.
Thankfully my sister is still twenty yards away, eyes roaming over the foreshore and the ramshackle hut lurking at its edge. She hasn’t noticed the thing in the mud. I think for the thousandth time that she’s really not cut out to be a mudlark. There’s no room for daydreamers on the foreshore. It’s nasty and it’s dangerous. But the alternative is even worse.
‘Have you found something exciting, Joe?’ she lifts her skirts in a pointless attempt to keep them clear of the filth and actually moves closer, eager to see what I’ve found.
‘NO!’ I swing around and glare into her eyes. ‘Stay there! I mean it!’ Surprised, she looks into my eyes. I’m never angry with her. Then she cranes around me to try and see what I’m looking at. Her mouth drops open.
‘Is that a –?’
‘I don’t know. I’ll check-‘ I try to keep the dread out of my voice. ‘Please, Edie, I need to check before you get too close.’
Every mudlark comes across dead bodies from time to time. It’s inevitable, London being what it is. But I haven’t got used to the sight, the smell, the stillness and the total absence of humanity in those I’ve discovered. I think I never will. Visions of those I’ve found, dumped as if they’re just another bit of rubbish, creep up on me when I allow my mind to relax. Nights are the worst. Sometimes I wake to blackness, heart thumping at apparitions of green flesh and eyeless faces. Please, don’t let this be another one to haunt my dreams.
So far, I’ve managed to shield Edie from such sights and I want to keep it that way. She’s too young. I know her unworldliness can’t last much longer, not in dog-eat-dog London, but as I see it, every extra day is a bonus, and I’m the only one who can prolong it. There isn’t much I wouldn’t do to protect her for just a little bit longer. That’s my job. I owe it to Dad.
Edie drops her head and stares hard at the sprinkling of shingle that’s leaving a trail across the mud. I think she has forgotten that she’s supposed to be my lookout, but that’s understandable.
I turn back to the thing on the shore, delving deep into the gritty pockets of my greatcoat for my talisman. There it is. Warm in spite of the cold day. Reassuring to the touch. I wrap my fingers around it and squeeze it and for a second it feels as if Dad is looking out for me.
I can do this.
Holding my breath, I bend down to lift away the crate.
//
Kate is a children’s writer. She lives in Saffron Walden with her husband, her son (when he’s home from university) and three neurotic cats. One of her cats, Maisie, is actually a ghost cat now, but Kate still talks to her every day.
Children’s book/Published: Sailing away to Nod/ Brenda M. Spalding/USA
Once upon a time, a young boy sailed on an ink black sea. The stars overhead twinkled and the moon showed the way. The little boat tossed and followed the wind to a far distant shore. The little boy left the boat and went to explore, as he had done so many times before. He trudged through the sand and followed the tracks that the sea turtles made. Along the way he gathered some shells, some smooth round stones, still warm from the sun and some bright pieces of sea glass all left by the waves. Beyond the sand and beyond the trees, he could see bright colored flags waving on a castle high on a hill.
He followed a path through the cool dark forest until he came to a clearing in the woods. In the clearing was a small cottage in need of repair. The roof was all sagging and the door off the hinges.
A strange little man sat in front of the door smoking a long stemmed pipe. He had an old battered hat perched on top of his head and a long white beard matched the hair on his head.
A gnome, a dwarf, the boy couldn’t tell. The man looked up as the boy approached. “Go away, there is nothing left to steal,” growled the little man.
“I’m not here to steal,” replied the boy. “I’m here to explore and see what I can see in this Land of Nod.”
“Well go explore somewhere else. I have nothing
left to steal. “
A giant lives in these woods.
“He took my cow. So I have no milk.
He took my chickens. So I have no eggs.
He took my beehives. So I have no honey to sell
at the market.
I shall probably starve.”
“I’m sorry for your troubles and wish I could
help,” said the boy.
“Well you can’t, so just go away,” shouted the
little man.
The young boy left the clearing and followed the path into the woods again. The path got steeper as he started to climb. Leaving the trees behind him, he saw a very large house with a very large door. There were chickens in the yard and a cow in a pen. He knew right away it was the giant’s house he saw. A little way off he could hear someone crying. He followed the sound and under a tree was the biggest, tallest man he had ever seen, bigger even than his Dad. The giant had long black hair and a long black beard. His clothes were all dirty and torn. His head in his hands, he was crying and moaning.
“I only wanted some honey. I meant them no harm.”
The giant looked up and shouted at the boy.
“What do you want? Just go away, please.”
“I don’t want anything,” said the boy. “I’m here to explore and see what I can see in this Land of Nod.”
Why are you crying, a big giant like you?” continued the boy.
“I’m crying because I have all these bee stings. I like honey, but the bees won’t let me have any.
They just get mad and sting me all over.” He cried even louder.
“Well maybe you should give them back to the little man down the hill. Then they won’t sting you anymore,” said the little boy.
With that the boy continued to follow the path up and toward the castle on the hill he walked. Inside the castle walls, a great fair was being held. There were acrobats and jugglers, wearing bright colors, and a man breathing fire, just like a dragon. There were stilt walkers weaving their way through the crowds. The gypsies in their tents were telling fortunes for money. They used a mystic ball and claimed to see all.
“Not one stall has any honey!” exclaimed a young girl as she stamped her foot, and started to wail.
She turned and noticed the boy and shouted. “What do you want? Just go away please, unless you have some honey to sell.”
“I don’t have any honey.” replied the boy. “I’m here to explore and see what I can see in this Land of Nod.”
“Go explore somewhere else,” the little girl stormed.
Brenda M. Spalding is a prolific award-winning author. She is often called upon to speak at book clubs, conferences, and writers’ groups. She is a past president of the National League of American Pen Women- Sarasota, Florida Branch, a member of the Sarasota Authors Connection, Sarasota Fiction Writers, Florida Authors and Publishers, and a co-founding member and current president of ABC Books Inc. Ms. Spalding formed Braden River Consulting LLC in 2020 to help other authors on their creative journey. Contacts -www.bradenriverconsulting.com
Short Stories / Unpublished: A General History of the Feminine Brain / Raluca Comanelea / USA
Hot Pockets
She put a trampoline in the living room where you constantly pass out watching all the TV shows on Earth. With utmost care, she hits pause on the remote control and throws a blanket over you, making sure that your toes are tucked in. She stares intensely. Her feminine brain exhibits a mild intoxication.
***
Your grandfather’s war medal stares you in the eye, boldly, reminding you of your long-forgotten androgens. Your chubby body remains static. You have long ago reclaimed the divan for your manly needs: pulling a nose hair with vigor, scrolling social media accounts in a premeditated order and hitting those likes mechanistically, caring less if the image depicts a fisherman or a mermaid, stirring into the food in front of you and blowing repeatedly in hopes that it cools off faster because your hunger is devilish. You barely complete 1850 steps on any given Saturday, 4000 on days you go to work, that is, if you’re lucky. Yet, you demand Hot Pockets with crispy crust. In the meantime, her culinary talents are wasted. She cannot compete with this insane need of yours for Hot Pockets.
***
You dream that your grandfather’s postwar dreams have turned reality with you. She knows they didn’t. You unconsciously wish that she expires first so that you can reclaim the whole length of the divan to yourself. You have not the slightest idea of how much she despises that divan. Her womanly heart has secretly wished for a chesterfield sofa since times immemorial: it’s been too long now to feel any fire burning.
She sits there, alongside you, numbed, waiting for you to fall asleep so that she can pause the show. She screams at the sight of the rodent. You stare emptily because in the end you know that the rodent is way too fast for any attempt at movement. Inside bugs have always given you those nightmarish creeps. Unable to catch the creature, any creature as a matter of fact, you unleash at her, exaggerating the piles of dirt which would consume the whole house. You burst into hysterical laughter because you have just laid a cruel truth out in the open. The whole thing becomes bearable now. She throws a yellow glass tumbler at you. Misses as you slightly incline your head to the left. You both know she is an awful thrower. She hates sports. Nature endowed her greatly. Sometimes you wonder why she is still there in the morning.
***
She wakes up and wonders if with today’s sun rising she is pregnant. She has learned to cultivate patience in this dry desert she permanently made her home. Her only deep-seated wish for a peaceful evening has been reduced to avoiding the crunchy sound of a crispy Hot Pocket crust coming from a mouth she long idolized, she long kept wet, she long breathed into.
Raluca Comanelea is a woman writer born in Romania. She enjoys green spaces, loose-leaf teas, and fine books. She goes to sleep with the same desire to own more time in the palm of her hand, so that her writing dreams would manifest freely. Raluca is a lover of American theatre and drama, with all sights set on Tennessee Williams and his complex female characterization. From Las Vegas, Nevada, she paints our world in fiction and nonfiction colors. Her imagined universe centers on the human drama lived behind closed doors of a dominator culture, one which pulls the average man into its vortex with an intensity hard to contain. Raluca’s novelette-in-flash, “The Art of Surviving in a Glass of Water,” has been awarded the Finalist title in the Newfound Prose Prize 2021 competition. Raluca’s creative work has been featured in STORGY Magazine, Reflex Fiction, Toho Journal and Secret Attic Journal, among other literary venues. You can connect with Raluca at www.ralucacomanelea.com
Historical fiction – Memoir /Published: Drudgeries for Feat, Identifying and Leveraging Opportunities in a Foreign Country/ Beatrice Hofmann /UK
BECOMING THE BOSS
I detected similarities where everyone saw differences and differences where everyone saw similarities. I was able to create new and unique solutions that resulted in a significant and enduring difference because I provided unique therapeutic services to people in my community around Oberhausen and its vicinity.
I have achieved so much with the support I have received from my network of friends and acquaintances. Be there for people when they need you, they will return your favour when the time comes. Partake in social functions to build your network. A key factor is to learn to network with the right people. For this, one has to understand the difference between acceptable and destructive criticism. A useful tool for this is using a SWOT analysis. It requires identifying the ‘Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats’ of the people in question. Conducting such research periodically on my own business as well as family situations has also helped me to sharpen my understanding of my very own position. Migrants are always a marginalised ethnic minority in any country. For migrants to escape insecurity, adversities and harsh conditions, entrepreneurship becomes the last resort for them to survive. Many migrants have become successful entrepreneurs in America, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and several countries across the globe. However, there is a typical pattern in all these activities that ultimately define the migrant entrepreneurial activity and their journey to entrepreneurship, I will describe these patterns using my own personal experiences.
Accumulating and Using Experience
I explored, I discovered, and I assessed my surroundings carefully and drew inferences on solid grounds. During my first years in Germany, I couldn’t go anywhere smoothly because my husband and his family wouldn’t let me, even mere taking my own daughter for an evening stroll wasn’t a walk in the park. Still, after my divorce, I became geographically, physically, and mentally mobile because I wanted to learn to know and expand my knowledge. It is this accumulated knowledge that developed into well-known patterns that revealed themselves in know-how, know-who, know-where, know-what, know-when and know-why that enabled me to quickly identify and exploit opportunities almost instinctively. Knowledge breeds experience, which makes the strange more familiar as factors keep reiterating themselves in ever-increasing clarity. My experience enabled me to master the fundamentals, which allowed me to efficiently react to situations and improvise with intuition.
Opportunity Orientation
I could recognise and analyse market opportunities. With a specific combination of handling risk, content, and market, I could redefine ‘risk’ as an opportunity to use my expertise, rather than as a possible reason for failure. I found prospects looking for better ways to provide new services and new approaches as well as explored a segment of the population which I knew could respond to a recent version of services targeted to lifestyle. What helped me is that I had a well-defined sense of searching for opportunities. I was always looking ahead and was less concerned about what I achieved yesterday. Many migrant entrepreneurs have searched for or created opportunities all the time, placing themselves between a chance and shaping themselves to seize it and quickly take advantage before it gets lost. I recognised the importance of being first, fast, and right, striving to seize and take full advantage of opportunities is why I was among the first black women to enter the wellness and beauty therapy industry in Germany. Entrepreneurs must recognise that action skills that get results are more critical than perfections that result from flawless planning.
Tact and Testing the Limits
I understood how different variables impacted on each other from the knowledge I had obtained at home, work, school, relationships and the community; I continually adjusted ends, means, values, and circumstances with the awareness of each impact. All four of the above mentioned decision dimensions are variables and partial determinants of each other. It’s this fluid view of these variables that provided me with the flexibility to determine the ends, forge the means, shape circumstances, and understand their value limits. I understood the German language fluently, the German policies, procedures, and rules of the matrix system; including how and when to stretch them beyond the limits and when to strictly adhere to them. This allowed me to open up the horizon into an opportunity-filled environment that I thought provided only restrictions rather than choices. The diverse experiences that I shared in the previous chapters show how I overstretched on all fronts but didn’t punch above my weight I repeatedly tested my limits and elements of every situation, about my own God-given abilities and talent, my willingness to act, and the power and willingness of my allies and adversaries to act. This usually involves appreciating that the world has no distinct rules of fairness and that the playing field is never level. So, testing limits primarily consists of determining which way the field slants and how to slant the area in one’s favour to keep winning, and that’s precisely what I did.
M/S Beatrice Hofmann is a beauty and wellness therapist, she has practiced her profession for 13 years now. She is a serial entrepreneur and business owner of Nu-life professional-wellness, a company she started in 2010, which she unfortunately closed on the 31.03.2021 due to the impact of Covid-19 pandemic. A move she says gave her the opportunity to pursue a career in Digital Marketing. Born and raised in Uganda, Beatrice moved to Germany in 1999 and views German as her focal point in life. With this unique background complemented by extensive travel across the globe, she sees herself as a cosmopolitan. Beatrice received the upcoming Entrepreneur Award 2015 of the AWE (African Women in Europe) in Geneva. She is also the co-founding commissioner of a Free University in the city of Oberhausen. She is an author and speaker; she co-authored the African immigrant’s ‘handbook’: “The perfect migrant”: How to Achieve a Successful life in Diaspora in 2018. Her autobiography “Drudgeries for feat “Identifying and leveraging opportunities in a foreign country was launched in December 2020. The book provides an account of the author’s life – that puts forward her story easily and spontaneously about various situations she went through in her native Uganda and Germany where she has now lived for 22 years. The Book, “Neurosensivität”; Die ReiseinsIch, in which she has also Co-authored will be launched very soon. In addition, she is a public speaker and has led and contributed to public seminars. Her journey is a real-life testimony that hard work pays, it is proof that immigrants can build successful lives in foreign countries if they have purpose and direction.
Poetry Unpublished: Resistance /Colin Campbell Robinson / Scotland
The night is late
So my friends, good-bye, and good luck.
Not one of night’s stars is a lie.
Yannis Ritsos
On crisp evenings they gather to plot the revolution of everyday Yannis is among them. On their barstools they shift positions. Fortunately he and his chair are in complete agreement.
What is the proletarian moon, I ask? The moon that swells the ocean and floods our heart, he replies. We play these monochords in the timeless way. Line after line, breathing.
He claims to have been taught the world by his body. I believe him. Listen to your own pores.
Can the explanation be in the inexplicable? I can’t explain. Always on foot, he says.
Late and dark, everyone has left the square; only Yannis remains, distractedly shining a shoe against his corduroy leg. A bird lands on a branch, sings about clouds.
What is the centre of the complete circle, I ask? Emptiness, he replies.
Coincidental meanings could collide and create new sense as they speed beyond light. Stars are keyholes, he says. My telescope can’t focus.
Such a light touch: dawn on the horizon. Natural miracle of luminous skin, the magic of response: early prayers. The world reflected in a mirror, eyes reflected in eyes.
Outside the church bells peel the rising sun.
A basket of tomatoes is a rhapsody, as is a gathering of kalamata, a conspiracy of peppers and the soul of bread. Do not forget the singing wine, Yannis says.
Loving the beautiful is necessary in the village of psalms. Roses and walls cling to each other amidst the brazen display of geraniums on a blanched windowsill.
Yannis reveals his codes certain in the knowledge only his comrades will read.
Follow the word, he says, and it will tell you what to write next. And there, in front of you, is the blank page.
The conversation circles till dusk and then we lay plans. How distant are we from walking? How many words before peace?
We are exhausted. We are alone. We climb the same hill. At the summit we find the future, then we descend once again, as in the past.
He can speak because of what he’s done. Even when he greets the morning he means it.
Water is good but not for drowning sorrows. Depth of voice may not indicate depth of purpose. Eyes may betray as easily as hold.
The daily split fingernail: something new to navigate. What about old dogs?
Later, he says we don’t have enough words to speak of nothing; this is on a night when lanterns lit the harbour and the boats lay silted.
Once I finished reading, the mountain stood before me higher than any mountain I’d ever seen before. And then cloud hid the peak.
A little later and its never, Yannis says. A stray black dog stares at the vacancy, seeing what no one wants to see.
I swot at a moth bothering my left ear; I take care not to kill. The moth flutters away only to brush against my candle flame. How many charred memories?
The porch releases the day’s heat. We sit, not daring to move in case we vanish. Even the nightingales cease singing, although, we’re not certain whether they even began.
An old man with a silver cane passes, stumbling from memory to memory in no particular order. He is at the gate. He waves. We wave back as we always do.
Secret signals shine light years away Yannis says, waiting for night.
The order of the sacraments has been disturbed. We have no answers.
The east wind wafts through the empty square where the Abbey once stood.
A muddy track rambles to a village of tuneless accordions; we were happy there.
Quiet; look out the window at the western river. A clock has been drowned. Many suspects roam free on the other side.
Wait for me at the tavern, Yannis says, attempting to reorder life.
His comrades disappear along with their vision, their dreams besmirched by a permanent grey stain.
What lies have been told, Yannis asks as he polishes the butt of his rifle?
Silently he walks the hall of his memory until he finds the door to an empty room.
As he enters the darkness he hears faint breathing, his own, or another?
The night is late.
Colin Campbell Robinson was born in Manchester in 1953 and emigrated with his family to Australia at the age of nine. After a less than dazzling academic career and years of factory work and other jobs, he became involved in community activism working with organisations such as the Tenants Union. In the 1990s he established a social research consultancy and became well known in Australia for his writing on social justice issues collaborating with a variety of non- government organisations to change the situation confronted by people experiencing homelessness, mental health problems, addiction and poverty, often all of the above. Colin returned to Britain in 2003 and continued to do social research work most notably with The Passage, the largest day centre for homeless people in London. Since 2013 he has devoted himself full time to writing and photography. His work has been published in many journals around the world. Knives Forks Spoons Press published his books Blue Solitude in 2018 and Footnotes from History – the Debord Variations in 2021. Colin currently lives on the Isle of Bute off the west coast of Scotland.
/Kurt Luchs / USA
Letter of Recommendation
by Kurt Luchs
To Whom It May Concern:
It is my pleasure to recommend Kurt Luchs for employment at your company. I have known Kurt for nearly six years and I can honestly say that I have not known any other Kurt for nearly as long.
Kurt was with our firm, Pendleton Tool & Die Co., for five and a half of those years. His employment with us ended amicably and by mutual agreement between both parties and the United States Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. In fact, Kurt was so dedicated that he stopped coming in each morning only when his desk was removed and the locks were changed. Every once in a while, I think I see his face behind a ventilation grille.
During his tenure with us, Kurt held a number of positions reflecting his range of talents and responsibilities: administrative assistant, assistant to the administrator, assistant administrator’s aide, administering assistant’s associate, and filing clerk. While it would be an exaggeration to say that he performed all his duties, it would be entirely fair to say that he performed them all equally well. In fact there was a consistency and tone to Kurt’s job performance that I have never before seen in a living employee— call it an almost supernatural sense of calm. There were times when only a mirror held to Kurt’s nostrils would reveal the fiery spirit and pulsing intellect within.
I credit Kurt entirely for inspiring the recent overhaul of our human resources department’s background-checking system. His knack for creative self-expression, by which he trans- formed a three-year stretch in a state reformatory into an M.B.A. from Harvard, was a constant source of amusement.
While some people can be described as “all heart” or “all head,” the best way to describe Kurt is “all hands.” From a friendly pat on the behind to a friendly pat of butter on the chest, he touched his female colleagues in more ways than most of them had ever heard of.
He was close to his male co-workers, too: in fact, on several occasions it took a stun gun to pry them apart. There were a few who had a hard time seeing Kurt’s good-natured roughhousing in the proper light. But in my opinion he never crossed the all-important line between first-degree manslaughter and second- degree murder.
I envy the next company that adds Kurt to its payroll. Why? Because hiring Kurt is like getting a free law school education. You may think you understand the First Amendment, but I’ll bet you had no idea that an employee has the constitutional right to emit sudden, piercing shrieks and deafening bursts of profanity near a fellow worker operating an industrial laser.
Kurt also displayed an uncommon willingness and ability to follow instructions—not my instructions but, rather, those he received from the voice in his head.
Kurt’s influence on everyone in our company was so extensive that there are still employees who won’t start their cars with- out checking under the hood first. You ask how and why Kurt left our company. Unfortunately, a court order prevents me from sharing all the details. But I can say in perfect candor that I heartily recommend Kurt as a resourceful and indefatigable addition to some other firm. Any other firm.
Sincerely,
Thomas R. Pendleton President Pendleton Tool & Die Co.
Kurt Luchs (kurtluchs.com) has poems published in Plume Poetry Journal, The Sun Magazine, and London Grip. He won the 2022 Pushcart Prize, as well as the 2019 Atlanta Review International Poetry Contest. He has written humor for the New Yorker, the Onion and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. and he has also written comedy for television (Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher and The Late Late Show with Craig Kilbourn) and radio (American Comedy Network). His humor collection, It’s Funny Until Someone Loses an Eye (Then It’sReally Funny) (2017), and his poetry collection, Falling in the Direction of Up (2021), are both published by Sagging Meniscus Press. His poetry chapbook, One of These Things Is Not Like the Other (2019), is published by Finishing Line Press. He lives in Portage, Michigan.
PRIZE / CATEGORY: Novels /Unpublished:
The Accidental Time Traveller / Sylvia Bluck /UK
Lily stumbles into the woods, eyes blurred by tears, brambles catching at her bare legs. Her friends are close behind, calling after her to come back, insisting that she’s mis-heard. Bloody liars. Their pitying looks confirmed that. She speeds up, twisting and turning through the trees, crushing bluebells as she runs. When she’s sure she’s lost them, she slows her pace and stops. Sinking to her knees, she covers her face and groans. It all makes sense now. Matt’s late nights, his lame excuses and his sudden, delicious bursts of affection. She bangs her fists on the ground and the pain feels good. She’s been blind and stupid. So stupid, stupid, stupid. She must go home and confront him. Impossible now to stay here and unclenching her fists, she gets to her feet and takes a few purposeful steps back the way she came.
What the …? She stops dead. Where are the bluebells? All around her, everything is green except for a few papery seed heads and she grasps a handful and scrunches them into tiny bits. Tilting her head left and right, she squints through her eyelashes, trying different angles. Maybe the bluebells only grow at the edge of the woods? She nods to herself. That’ll be it. She wasn’t paying attention. Retracing her steps, she looks out for any hint of blue but even at the edge of the woods, there are no bluebells. She rubs the last few seeds from her hands and shrugs. To be honest, missing bluebells are the least of her worries.
Squaring her shoulders, she steps out into the sunshine to face her friends. For a moment, the brightness dazzles her and shading her eyes, she scans the empty field. Where the hell are they? She runs to the spot where they’d set up camp and as she shouts their names, a crow flies up, cawing angrily. She feels in her bra for her phone. Damn. She must have put the bloody thing down on the picnic table. Her stomach lurches. But where’s the picnic table? And where’s the car, come to that?
She runs back into the woods, calling out to her friends. Picking up a stick, she bangs it on a tree and the sound ricochets around the woods like gunshots. As the echoes fade into silence, she stands listening, her heart thudding in her ears. They’ve clearly gone and left her here, in the middle of nowhere. She gives a vicious kick to a stone on the path, and it skitters away into the bushes. Bastards. She’ll have something to say when she sees them – if she ever speaks to them again.
She sets off through the trees and back to the farm track where they drove down that morning. The fields are now shimmering in the heat and as she climbs, sweat snakes down her back. Stopping under the shade of a tree to catch her breath, she leans back against the trunk and looks up. Dead crows are tied to a branch above her head and swing gently in the breeze. She recoils, exclaiming in disgust and hurries on.
In a few minutes, she reaches the top of the track, a cloud of midges whining around her head. She bats them away. Bloody countryside. And of course she’s the only idiot out hiking in this heat. Even the sheep have sense enough to move into the shade – although she doesn’t remember any sheep – weren’t there crops in the fields when they drove in? She gives a little shake of her head. Obviously, there can’t have been. The unshaded track stretches across the fields and she knows there’s nothing that way for miles. It’s a no-brainer to choose the footpath ahead through the trees.
In half a mile, it turns into a gravelled road with hedges on each side and Lily smiles to herself as she glimpses people in a garden gathered around a table. One of them will let her use their phone. From the garden gate, she can see the table is covered with white linen, tiered silver cake-stands and bowls of yellow roses. A woman in a smart black uniform and a white cap is carrying a tray back to the porticoed house. Lily groans. Just her luck to be crashing a wedding-party. Wishing she were wearing more than skimpy shorts, she takes a deep breath and opens the gate.
//
I was inspired to write this novel sitting around a campfire in a small wood in the English countryside, imagining walking into the trees and coming out into a different time. What might happen? Who would you meet? Would you ever get home?
To learn the novel writing craft (and to get the novel written), I studied on the two year Creative Writing Course with New Writing South, Brighton, UK and with the Novelry online course. As I’ve worked on this novel, I’ve had lots of brilliant help and feedback from fellow writers in Brighton and around the world. The novel has been long-listed for the Exeter, Flash 500 and Cinnamon first novel prizes; short-listed for the Blue Pencil Agency First Novel Award; and a finalist in the Page Turner Novel Awards and Eludia Novel Award. In my day job, I work for the UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (but not in a Time Travel Unit) and live in Brighton, with my partner and two almost fully-fledged children. We have a small wood in the countryside where I go to write.
GRAND PRIZE /Published / poetry /Alicia Hokanson /Perishable World /Ed.: Pleasure Boat Studio/USA
Eurydice, In Winter
Today deep frost on the Field of Asphodel and the children exclaiming,
It looks just like snow.
I could almost remember excitement like theirs– that loose fire in the blood.
I watch the ferryman on the black river struggle to lift coins from mouths of the fallen. His hands can barely hold them,
but I can see he wants so much to feel their glittering weight.
In this place everything falls away and falls away– even the hound patrolling the bank
is only growls and posturing.
Though I have begged the goddess
for some small remnant of my other life, she cannot help. She is only a cold, pale girl who misses her mother.
You know what I long for—
notes along the deep chord strung between breast and thigh,
the least pull away a death
if your arm leaves the nest of my side.
What a disturbance of earth and sky—
until we open our eyes, gathered back into the world.
A native of Seattle, Washington, Alicia Hokanson grew up exploring the beaches, forests, and islands of Puget Sound, which inspired a deep attention to the natural world. Her first book, Mapping the Distance, was selected by Carolyn Kizer for the King County Arts Commission publication prize. She has also published two chapbooks, Phosphorous and Insistent in the Skin, and her poems have appeared in a wide variety of journals and anthologies. Her most recent collection, Perishable World, was published in summer of 2021. Upon completing her B.A. and M.A. in English at the University of Washington, Alicia pursued a career teaching in a variety of venues, from working with high-school students in South Australia to teaching grades 1-8 in a one-room schoolhouse on a remote island in Washington state. She spent the last 27 years of her career teaching middle school English in Seattle, and was named River of Words Poetry Teacher of the year in 2003 for her work nurturing young writers. She now devotes her time to writing, reading, and advocating for social and environmental justice.
GRAND PRIZE /Unpublished: Bridge over the Neretva / novel / Django Wylie /Switzerland
one
First there is the commotion; then there is the quiet. Jakov watches his brother stand at the apex of the bridge, shifting slightly from one bare foot to the other. The crowd whispers with nervous excitement. He can sense them silently calculating the distance of the drop — anticipating a stunning success — but possibly also a little hungry for disaster. A young child starts to cry, but is quickly hushed by its mother. Jakov sees Mehmed tilt his head upwards, perhaps in prayer, or perhaps in an attempt to briefly divert his attention from the eager water below. He is among a forest of cameras and phones, ready to capture the dive from a hundred different angles and to secure the spectators some ‘likes’ on their Instagrams. For the next minute, he is an event rather than a person. But Jakov can sense something more elemental at work here. Undoubtedly, Mehmed is skilled at what he does. But his diving seems more a triumph of instinct over technique. His ability seems intuitive; it derives, Jakov thinks, from having had this bridge — and this schismatic river — at the centre of his life from the troubled moment of his birth.
At last the time has come. The crowd holds its collective breath. Mehmed lifts both of his lean, muscular arms above his body. He then lowers them, taking on a messianic pose in the glare of the golden sun. He bends his knees slightly, and then, in one bold action, propels himself forwards off of the bridge. At once, there is a crush, a press, a clamour, to get the perfect shot of the diver hitting the water. From the banks below, a few tourists playing cards, and drinking large bottles of Mostarsko, stop and stare at the diving man. They watch as Mehm’s body plunges towards the tiny pocket of dazzling turquoise, nestled amongst the rocky shallows and the weeds. Jakov wonders what his brother thinks about in the second or so it takes to reach the water. Is he focussed on the dive, he wonders; on making the necessary calibrations to his body’s movement to ensure he reaches that small haven of glittering blue? Does he see the tourists, marvelling at a man, not remarkably unlike them, yet doing something they could never do? Or is his mind gorgeously, serenely blank? And, if so, is that why he dives so much — to briefly leave behind the thronging turmoil of all there is and all that has gone before?
His brother hits the water and a silvery effusion leaps high into the air. The crowd on the bridge begins to applaud. Below, a small clutch of canoes is deployed to guide Mehmed to shore. This is Jakov’s cue. He turns and works his way around the spectators, most of whom are already beginning to drift away in search of other diversions. “Spare change for the diver?” he asks, in English. “Fifty kuna?” he says. “Five euros? Ten marks for the dive?” A few people pay, but the majority either pat their pockets apologetically, or frown at him. Jakov tries to target the Americans. Used to paying for everything all the time, they are often the most generous. “Excuse me, sir, for the diver? I’m sorry, we can only accept US dollars in amounts above one thousand.” He beams.
/ Django Wylie /Switzerland /I’m an English and Drama teacher, based in Switzerland. I hold an MA in Creative Writing from Goldsmiths and studied poetry at UC Berkeley. In 2017, I was the recipient of the Yeovil Literary Prize, and in 2019 I won the Indigo Dreams Firsts Competition. I had a prose manuscript shortlisted for the London Magazine First Novel Award and the Blue Pencil Agency Novel Award. My first collection of poetry, New and Selected Heartbreaks, was published in May of 2019.
Eyelands Book Awards 